Transcriber’s Note
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  LAST WINTER

  IN

  THE UNITED STATES

  BEING

  TABLE TALK

  COLLECTED DURING A TOUR THROUGH
  THE LATE SOUTHERN CONFEDERATION, THE FAR WEST,
  THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS, &c.

  BY F. BARHAM ZINCKE

  VICAR OF WHERSTEAD AND CHAPLAIN IN ORDINARY TO THE QUEEN

  LONDON
  JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET
  1868

  _The right of translation is reserved_




TO MY WIFE

I Dedicate these Pages


BECAUSE, WHILE OF ALL WOMEN I AM ACQUAINTED WITH SHE WOULD HAVE BEEN
MOST CAPABLE OF ENTERING INTO THE INTEREST OF THE SCENES AND OF THE
STATE OF SOCIETY THEY DESCRIBE, SHE DETERMINED, FOR THE SAKE OF HER
ONLY CHILD, TO FOREGO THAT PLEASURE; AND URGED ME NOT TO LOSE, FROM
CONSIDERATION FOR HER, AN OPPORTUNITY FOR CARRYING OUT A LONG-CHERISHED
WISH TO VISIT THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

  WHERSTEAD VICARAGE:

  _Nov. 24, 1868_.




CONTENTS.


  CHAPTER I.

                                                                    PAGE

  The Winter Voyage recommended—A Cabin to oneself may then
  be had at no additional cost—Advantages of Travelling in America
  in Winter—A Feeling in a Gale—The Americans on board
  the Steamer—Divine Service on Board                                  1


  CHAPTER II.

  New York—_Menu_ at Fifth Avenue Hotel—How Travel in the
  States may be arranged for a Winter Tour—The Queen’s Book
  in America—External Appearance of New York—Ignorance of
  English Immigrants—Industrial Schools—Children’s Aid Society—Number
  of Churches—Broad Views general—A Service
  at the Rev. H. W. Beecher’s Church—Episcopalian Broad Church
  Club—Chapels in poor Districts annexed to Episcopal Churches
  in rich ones—American Churches worked at High Pressure—An
  American Divine’s Opinion of a Minister’s Duty                       8


  CHAPTER III.

  Why an unreasonable Fancy was acted on—The History of the
  Cause of American Progressiveness—What passes in America
  important to us—The Northern States sown broadcast with
  Houses                                                              24


  CHAPTER IV.

  The Locomotive in the Streets—In Baltimore Public Opinion first
  becomes Southern—Growth and Prospects of Baltimore—On
  Trading Politicians and Ill-will to England—Why an American
  Tutor thought necessary for an Englishman—Repudiation—The
  Masses and Middle Class in favour of it—Arguments in favour
  of it—An Argument used 2,000 Miles from Wall Street—Why
  Republicans bound to repudiate—Americans addicted to Abstract
  Reasoning—Instances                                                 32


  CHAPTER V.

  Washington—Style of Speaking in Congress—Congress no Nursery
  for Statesmen—Society in Washington—Episcopal Church in
  Washington—Some Opinions of an American Bishop—Commissioner
  of Agriculture—Use of the Department—Its Museum
  gives an Idea of the Vastness of the Country—Its Natural
  Advantages—What Variety of Productions has done for England
  will be repeated in America—Special Excellence of Californian
  Productions—The Californian himself—California compared
  with Italy—Why Coloured Waiters preferable to White—Negro
  Funeral with Masonic Honours—American Birds’ Nests—Bill
  for making Education compulsory—Coloured Schools—Comparative
  Intelligence of the Negro—Vulgar Errors about Americans—Night
  Attendants at Hotel read ‘Oliver Twist’—Capitol—Treasury—Patent
  Office—What our Diplomacy in America
  should be—Use of Iced Water                                         44


  CHAPTER VI.

  Richmond—Way by the Battle-fields—Handiness of American
  Soldiers—Effect of Slavery on the Virginian Landscape—Appearance
  of American Forest—Republican Relations of Father
  and Son—State of Feeling in Virginia—Billiards in America—Why
  Richmond Millers undersold by Californian—Why American
  Cities are Large—American Living—Prospects of Richmond—Indications
  of Southern Climate in Richmond—Church-matters
  in Richmond—Interest that attaches to Richmond, and to the
  Heroism of the South                                                67


  CHAPTER VII.

  How Southerners describe their own Condition—Each State must
  be taken separately—Missouri—Tennessee—Kentucky—Texas—Virginia—
  Georgia—Florida—North Carolina—Arkansas—South
  Carolina—Louisiana—Mississippi—Will the Blacks get
  the Franchise?—No party considers them fit—They will have
  it for a time—This will weaken the repudiating party—Also
  the party hostile to this country—The Blacks will not all be
  republican—The South should have been left alone to settle the
  Labour Question—The Bureau suggested false ideas—There will
  be no war of races—What will kill out the Blacks—The rate of
  this—Fusion physically impossible—Means of Communication
  in the South indicate its condition                                 91


  CHAPTER VIII.

  First Sight of a Cotton-field—Spanish Moss—A Night on the
  Rails—Many kinds of sameness in America—Maize—Order of
  Succession in the Forest—Its extent—Evergreens in the Southern
  Forest—Poor land in the South may be more profitable than
  rich land in the West—Deadness of Charleston—Its Hotels—A
  Charleston Sam Weller—The Naples of the United States—Few
  English Travellers—Sufferings of Southern Families—Want
  of schools—How the deficiency is being supplied—Blacks should
  be put on same footing as Whites—Dialogue with Black Member
  of Convention—Another Convention—Able Black Member—South
  Carolina Orphan Asylum                                             109


  CHAPTER IX.

  Cold in South Carolina and Georgia—Curious appearance of Ice—Time
  not valued in the South—Why Americans will not cultivate
  the Olive—Tea might grow in Georgia—Atlanta bound to
  be great—Cattle badly off in winter—A Virginian’s Recollection
  of the War—His Position and Prospects—Approach to Mobile
  by the Alabama River—Mobile—The Harbour—Why no American
  Ships there—A Day on the Gulf—Ponchatrain—New
  Orleans—French Sunday Market—French appearance of Town—A
  New Orleans Gentleman on the Episcopal Church—Bishop
  Elect of Georgia—Mississippi—The Cemeteries—Expensiveness
  of everything—Transatlantic News—Fusion of North and South—French
  Half-breeds—Roads—The best in the World—Approach
  to New Orleans by land—Sugar Plantations—A
  Prayer for a Brother Minister                                      126


  CHAPTER X.

  My only Delay on an American Railway—No concealing one’s
  Nationality—Railway Cow-plough—Pistols—Memphis—Emigration
  from the South deprecated—True Method of Resuscitation—The
  Minister’s Study—Conversation with two Ministers—Invitation
  to ‘go to Church’ 150 Miles off—Luxury does not
  sap the Military Spirit—Mrs. Read—Entry into Eden—Share a
  Bed-room with a Californian—How California was civilised—How
  a Site upon the Swamp was created for Cairo—Decline the
  fourth part of a Bed-room at Odin—‘Be good to yourself’            146


  CHAPTER XI.

  Mississippi frozen over at St. Louis—Why the Bridge at St. Louis
  is built by Chicago Men—General Sherman—Ideas about Education
  at St. Louis—Liberal Bequests for Educational Purposes—How
  New Englandism leavens the whole Lump—The German
  Invasion will not Germanise America—St. Louis—Its rapid
  Growth—Its Church Architecture—An Idea on Mental Culture
  from the West Bank of the Mississippi—A Thought suggested
  by hearing the Skaters on the Mississippi talking English          164


  CHAPTER XII.

  Instance of American Kindliness—Red-skins and Half-breeds on
  the Rails—Cincinnati and its Inhabitants—What may be
  made of Pigs—The influence of its Pork-crop—Machinery
  for Killing and Curing—Improving effect American Equality
  has on the highest and lowest Class—Churches only unprosaic
  Buildings in American Towns—Schools—Merits of Philadelphian
  style of City-building not obvious—In what it consists—America
  has but one City—No. 24, G Street, corner of 25th Street           172


  CHAPTER XIII.

  The Valley of the Ohio—Much of the United States will produce
  Wine—Illinois at Night—First View of Lake Michigan—Chicago—A
  Sign of outward Religion—‘Small-pox here’—Fire
  Alarm—Liberality of Chicago Merchants—The Dollar not all-in-all—A
  Church lighted from the Roof—A handsome American—America
  has developed a new type of Features—Chicago Schools—An
  exception to the American way of denouncing the official
  Class—Chicago Sunday Schools—Programme of one I attended—Excellence
  of Water at Chicago—How supplied—Lifting up
  the City—Post Office Arrangements—A disadvantage of frequent
  change of Clerks—Americans on Aristocracy—How the Germans,
  the masses of the people, and the upper class feel towards it      182


  CHAPTER XIV.

  Prairie from Chicago to Omaha—Plains from North Platte to the
  Mountains—Omaha, the intersection of the Pacific Railway
  and the Missouri—Temporary Bridge over the Missouri—Indifference
  to Risks affecting Life—A Prairie Fire—The Forest on
  the Mountains on Fire—Fire the cause of the Treelessness of the
  Prairies—First found Animal Life abounding in the Valley of the
  Platte—‘The hardest place, Sir, on this Continent’—Its
  Predecessor—How it is possible to establish Lynch Law at Shyenne—My
  first Night in Shyenne—A second Night in Shyenne—Necessity
  and advantages of Lynch Law—‘The use of the Pistol’—A
  Man shot because ‘he might have done some mischief’—Newness
  of Aspects both of Society and of Nature                           202


  CHAPTER XV.

  The Armament and Experience of a German Herdmaster—A Stage
  Coach on the Plains—The Party in the Coach—The only
  Colonel I met in the United States—The Colonel’s Wife—A
  Colorado Herdmaster—A Philadelphian Graduate—Two jocose
  Denver Storekeepers—Advantage of having one’s Rifle in the
  Coach—A Californian’s account of a Skirmish with Indians—Manners
  and Life at a house on the Plains—A Lady of the
  Plains—American Society judges Men fairly—Between Shyenne
  and Denver                                                         221


  CHAPTER XVI.

  The City of Denver—The Ladies give a Ball—Manners of Denver—‘Quite
  our finest Gentleman’—The Plains will be to America
  an improved Australia—The advantages they offer for Flocks
  and Herds—Will soon be clear of Indians—Markets now opened
  to them—Size of the Runs—Wealth of the Region                      233


  CHAPTER XVII.

  The Rocky Mountains—Golden City—Golden Gates—Mining
  Towns—Neighbouring Mountains stripped of every Tree—What
  grows on the Mountains—American Horses—Roads and Bridges
  they have to pass—How, six-in-hand, we went down a Hillside
  in the Mountains—A nice Distinction as to Accidents on this
  Hill—Climate—Wind-storms—Birds—Dogs                                241


  CHAPTER XVIII.

  Rocky Mountains a Field for Sporting—Great variety and abundance
  of Game—Wild Fruit—Excellence of Climate in the
  shooting season—How the Mountains may be reached, and how
  much seen by the way, in 15 days from Liverpool—Cost of the
  Expedition—The best Camping Ground is the South Park at
  foot of Pike’s Peak—The Route by Chicago and Denver
  recommended—Other Route by St. Louis and Leavenworth—Route
  into the Park—The North Park easier work—The more enterprising
  may go to Laramie Plains—Will deteriorate every year               249


  CHAPTER XIX.

  Hotel Cars, real First-class Carriages—An Editor on his Countrymen’s
  Knowledge—American Grandiloquence—Of whom this
  is said—Necessary to repeat some of what one hears—‘Have
  you seen our Forest?’—‘The Pacific Rails will carry the commerce
  of the world’—Large Acquaintance Americans have—An
  American on Letters of Introduction—Niagara—The American
  and Canadian Falls—What is in the mind magnifies what one
  sees—The Stone Trough it has chipped out—Ice Bridge—How
  Niagara is pronounced—A Week of Canadian Weather—A
  Snow-bound Party at Niagara                                        258


  CHAPTER XX.

  Educational Department at Toronto—Canadian Arguments against
  Common Schools—A Canadian’s Opinion on Secular Schools in
  England—How the Canadians’ Objections are met in the United
  States—Upper Canadians not yet a People—Advantages possessed
  by Upper Canada—Service at the Romanist and Anglican
  Cathedrals—Unmannerly Behaviour permitted on Canadian
  Railways—Badness of their Carriages—Why Canada is not ‘the
  Land of Freedom’—Yankee Smartness in Train-driving—Picturesqueness
  of Vermont—Travelling on American Railways
  not fatiguing                                                      269


  CHAPTER XXI.

  Boston is the Hub of America—Mr. Ticknor—Professor Rogers
  and the Technological—Mr. Norton—Professor Agassiz—Mr.
  Appleton and Mr. Longfellow—Mr. Philbrick—A Grammar
  School Commemoration—Humility of the better Literary Men of
  Boston—Regret at leaving Boston                                    279


  CHAPTER XXII.

  American Hotels—Why some People in America travel without
  any Luggage—Conversation at Tables-d’hôte should be encouraged—The
  Irish, the African, and the Chinese—Can a Republic
  do without a Servile Class?—What will be the ultimate Fate of
  these three races in America—No Children—Motives—Means—
  Consequences—Why many young Men and young Women make
  Shipwreck of Happiness in America—The course many Families
  run—America the Hub of the World                                   286


  CHAPTER XXIII.

  On American Common Schools—Conclusion                              299




INTRODUCTION.


No one would now think of writing a continuous narrative of travel in
the United States of America. The only alternative hitherto adopted
has been that of Essays on American subjects. But towards these the
opinion of the reading public has not been so favourable as to make
one desirous of adding to their number. There appears, however, to be
another form, as yet, I believe, untried, in which he who has travelled
in a country, about which people know much, but from which they are
still desirous of hearing something more, may present to the reader
what he has to say. He may write, I mean, somewhat in the fashion of a
book of table-talk. This he may do by confining himself just to what he
knows would be listened to with interest in a company of intelligent
persons who had some acquaintance with the subject; and by putting what
he has to say of this kind with the conciseness, and, if possible, with
the point, required in conversation. This would render it necessary
that the book should consist rather of paragraphs than of chapters; and
that these should frequently have little or no connection; many of them
being very brief, because they will contain merely some observation, or
the notice of some fact, for which half a dozen lines will suffice. It
is in this way that I now propose to write about America, trusting that
by so doing I shall spare my readers’ time and patience.




A WINTER

IN

THE UNITED STATES.




CHAPTER I.

 THE WINTER VOYAGE RECOMMENDED—A CABIN TO ONE’S SELF MAY THEN BE HAD
 AT NO ADDITIONAL COST—ADVANTAGES OF TRAVELLING IN AMERICA IN WINTER—A
 FEELING IN A GALE—THE AMERICANS ON BOARD THE STEAMER—DIVINE SERVICE ON
 BOARD.


I would recommend the man who begins to feel the effects of
long-continued professional labour, or of an idle and luxurious life,
if his constitution is still capable of amendment, to try what may be
gained by a voyage across the Atlantic, and back again, in winter; with
such an interval between the two as he might be able to allow for a
tour in the United States. In the summer the weather is likely to be so
fine that the only benefit he would derive from his two voyages would
be that of breathing the air of the ocean for as many days as he would
spend in making them; but in winter there would be almost a certainty
of some rough weather; and if after a few days he should prove capable
of resisting the usual disturbing effects of such weather at sea,
and come to take a pleasure in facing and battling against boisterous
winds and tossing waves, I do not know what could more rapidly brace
up within him what had begun to fail. Even the mere finding of one’s
sea-legs, and the subsequent use of them under difficulties, would
not be unattended with advantage, for I suppose it would bring into
action and develope muscles not much used at other times. In winter,
too, the air would be cool (it is not at all necessarily cold at that
season on the track between England and America, except when one nears
the American coast), and this coolness of the air would of itself have
with many constitutions an invigorating effect. But be the process what
it may by which your two ocean voyages bring about their renovating
result, that result is that you return to your home a stronger and a
hungrier man than you were before you left it.

[Sidenote: _Advantages of Travelling in Winter._]

There is always much inconvenience and discomfort in sharing at sea the
few square feet a cabin contains with another man, however gentlemanly
he may be; and it is not improbable that one taken promiscuously
from a hundred and fifty Transatlantic travellers would possess some
habit or infirmity which would render such close companionship almost
insufferable. In summer you cannot avoid this misery except at a great
cost. To be alone at that season you must pay the fare of the one
or two additional berths in your cabin which you wish should remain
unoccupied. But in winter the number of passengers being always less
than the number of berths, you can stipulate for a cabin to yourself
without being put to any additional expense. There are now so many
competing lines of steamers to America, that neither on the outward nor
homeward voyage will you find any difficulty on this head. And you need
not scruple about asking for this accommodation, for it may be granted
to you without at all lessening either the profits of the owners of the
ship, or the comforts of any one of the passengers.

Travelling also on the _terra firma_ of America in winter has its
advantages. At this season of the year you find everybody at home; and
if your object is rather to see the people than the country in which
they live, this will alone outweigh all other considerations. The
Americans being the most locomotive people in the world, are seldom
to be found at home in summer. I travelled through the States in the
winter and the early spring, and had letters of introduction to persons
in every city I stayed at, and in no instance did I find anyone absent
from home, with the single exception of a gentleman who happened to
be just at that time discharging his duties as Member of Congress at
Washington, whereas the letter which had been given me was directed to
him at his house at Chicago, where I presented it. In winter, also, one
escapes the persecutions of the mosquitoes, and of the creeping things
that bite in beds, of the withering heat, and tormenting dust—those
inevitable concomitants of travel under an American summer sun.

What is lost by confining one’s travels in America to the (botanically)
dead season of the year is, that nothing is seen of the summer and
autumn aspects of the vegetation of the country. Its winter aspect,
however, is not without interest to the Englishman, whose eye is
accustomed to the perennial green of his own parks and meadows, which
are generally, indeed, even greener at Christmas than at Mid-summer.
While in America I did not see in the winter and early spring a blade
of grass that was even faintly tinted with green, from Canada to the
Gulf of Mexico, or from New York to the Rocky Mountains. I was told
that the blue grass of parts of Kentucky and Virginia is an exception,
but of this I saw nothing myself. I found the roadsides, pastures, and
prairies everywhere clothed in unrelieved drab.

To look out from one of the Cunard Company’s magnificent steam-ships,
where everything is going on with the precision of clockwork, while
a gale is raging on the ocean around you, and to see that in the
Mid-Atlantic you are master of the winds and waves, makes you feel that
it is something to be a man.

[Sidenote: _American Fellow-Passengers._]

As I was going to America to see the Americans, I took the first
opportunity which presented itself—that of the voyage to America—for
weighing and measuring the specimens of that very compound race who
happened to be on board the ship in which I was sailing. About half the
passengers, forty-five in all, were of German extraction; and about
half of this half were of the Hebrew persuasion. One young fellow among
these latter, who I suppose might be regarded as a representative
of the broad synagogue, delivered it as his opinion, that the time
had come when the Jews should give up all their peculiar practices
which modern knowledge had proved to be founded in misconceptions
and mistakes. He instanced their abstinence from pork, and from the
blood of the animals they used for food, and their method of killing
animals. One of these Teutonic Americans, a youth with such a width
of shoulder, and massiveness of neck and head, that no one could look
upon him without being reminded of a buffalo, was an Indian trader
from the borders of Kansas. His practice was to give the Indians four
dollars’ worth of goods for such a buffalo robe as sells in London for
fifty or sixty shillings. It was his opinion that Indians were vermin
which should on every opportunity have a dose of lead administered to
them. When asked if this was justifiable, ‘Well,’ he replied, ‘they
are a set of bloodthirsty, treacherous skunks; and they must all die
out, or be shot down, and it can’t matter much to them which it is. It
comes to much the same in the end. They shot my brother, and my plan
is to take a shot at them whenever I have a chance.’ All these German
Americans spoke English as fluently as they did German. Their most
prominent idea appeared to be hatred of all aristocracies. That of the
United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland they regarded with their
purest hatred, because it seemed to them the most developed and the
most powerful. The best mannered people of the party were the Yankee
and New York traders; some of these were buyers for large wholesale
and retail houses, others on their own account. There were about a
dozen of them on board. They were very careful about their dress,
and their conversation was pleasing and intelligent. The majority of
them were entirely free from the Yankee tone of voice. They were the
very reverse of pushing, and they never guessed. In appearance and
manners they would have passed amongst ourselves for gentlemen. We had,
however, among the passengers one genuine Yankee of the received type.
He had been a successful inventor of improvements in machinery, though
medicine, not mechanics or engineering, was his business. He thought
that anything by which he could make money was as much his business
as his profession was. He was always talking, and ready to argue on
any subject: if unacquainted with it, that made no difference—he
still had a right to express his opinion. His favourite idea was that
discussion led to knowledge, and that books came after knowledge, and
that therefore they were not of much value. This dictum he fearlessly
applied to everything—to history, to science, and to religion.
Theoretically he was a strong Negrophilist. He believed that the
patriarchs and prophets, that the Saviour of the world and His apostles
were all Negroes. He thought that the amount of wealth a man had been
able to accumulate was the true measure of a man, because all pursued
wealth, and employed in the pursuit the whole of their power. If a man
was idle or stupid, he employed what power was left him, after so much
had been cancelled by his idleness or stupidity. And therefore—for this
was his conclusion—if he could produce several blacks, which he was
sure he could do, who had accumulated more wealth than anyone present,
then they were better men than any of the present company. I say he was
theoretically a Negrophilist, because, although he liked the Negro, he
liked him best at a distance. In politics, he held that clever men,
and men with ideas, were the bane of the country. They had already got
their constitution and their laws. The people did not want a letter of
either altered, or anything added to either. All officers, therefore,
elected by the people, whether for the general or the local government,
were in the position of servants with written instructions. No one
would tolerate a domestic servant who, in the face of his instructions,
thought for himself; nor ought the people ever to re-elect a public
servant who acted in this way. Indeed he held that no man should ever
be re-elected, but that all public offices should be made ‘to go as
far as possible’ in bringing into notice deserving young men, and in
helping them on a little, and in rewarding in a temporary way those
who had exerted themselves on behalf of their party. He was always
joking; his jokes consisting of grotesque impossibilities and laughable
exaggerations. But his unconscious and unfailing conceit, and his
assumptions of omniscience, were as ridiculous as his jokes.

[Sidenote: _American Fellow-Passengers._]

On Sunday Divine Service was celebrated in the saloon. The service was
that of the Established Church. The Germans absented themselves. The
Americans were all present, and behaved very well, many of them making
the responses audibly. The Bishop of Ontario read the prayers, and an
English clergyman preached. Some of the Americans proposed to him that
he should, as they expressed it, ‘hold another meeting’ in the evening;
but it would not have been right to drive the Germans a second time on
to the deck.




CHAPTER II.

 NEW YORK—MENU AT FIFTH AVENUE HOTEL—HOW TRAVEL IN THE STATES MAY
 BE ARRANGED FOR A WINTER TOUR—THE QUEEN’S BOOK IN AMERICA—EXTERNAL
 APPEARANCE OF NEW YORK—IGNORANCE OF ENGLISH IMMIGRANTS—INDUSTRIAL
 SCHOOLS—CHILDREN’S AID SOCIETY—NUMBER OF CHURCHES—BROAD VIEWS
 GENERAL—A SERVICE AT THE REV. H. W. BEECHER’S CHURCH—EPISCOPALIAN
 BROAD CHURCH CLUB—CHAPELS IN POOR DISTRICTS ANNEXED TO EPISCOPAL
 CHURCHES IN RICH ONES—AMERICAN CHURCHES WORKED AT HIGH PRESSURE—AN
 AMERICAN DIVINE’S OPINION OF A MINISTER’S DUTY.


During my first visit to New York I stayed at the Fifth Avenue Hotel,
which I had been told was the largest and best managed of the monster
hotels of the city. I arrived just in time for dinner. On being shown
into the dining-saloon, I found between two and three hundred people
at table. I had lately been staying at Paris at the _Grand Hôtel du
Louvre_, where it was thought we were treated rather liberally in
having seven _plats_ at dinner, including two sweets, and one cream
or water ice. The ice was served in infinitesimal morsels; and if you
asked for a second morsel, it was represented by an additional franc
in your bill. With this experience of a great European hotel fresh
in my mind, a waiter in the dining saloon of the Fifth Avenue Hotel
placed in my hand the bill of fare for the dinner then going on. Seeing
almost an interminable printed list of _comestibles_, and not knowing
how these things were managed in America, I supposed that this was
the list of dishes the hotel undertook to prepare; and that, had I
arrived some hours earlier, and then made my selection, what I might
have ordered would have now been ready. The _menu_ contained turtle
soup, venison, turtle steaks, soft-shelled crabs, canvas-back ducks;
in short, whatever fish, flesh, fowl, vegetable, and fruit were then
in season. But the attendant informed me that the paper he had given
me was the bill of fare for that day, and that everything mentioned in
it was then actually ready; and that I might order whatever I pleased,
and it would be immediately brought to me. I made my selection; and
while he was bringing what I had ordered, I counted the number of
dishes provided that day for our dinner, and found that the total
amounted to seventy-five. Nothing was supplied in the scanty way in
which everything was doled out at the _Grand Hôtel du Louvre_; but as
a general rule more of everything was set before you than you could
require: for instance, instead of setting before you a morsel of
ice-cream, a whole mould was left with you till you ordered it to be
taken away. The next morning I found fifty-two things mentioned on the
bill of fare for breakfast. Luncheon, tea, and supper are also supplied
to its guests by this establishment. On the ground-floor are placed
the bar, the billiard-room (containing twelve tables), and a kind of
after-hour Stock Exchange, in which operations are commenced at eight
o’clock P. M. The charge for living in this palatial hotel was five
dollars a day in greenbacks; that is, about sixteen shillings, at the
then price of gold.

[Sidenote: _Menu of an American Hotel._]

One frequently hears the severity of their winters urged as a reason
for not travelling in the United States at that season of the year.
My own experience of the unusually severe winter of ’67-68 would go
some way towards proving that those who press this consideration do so
under a misapprehension. It is possible that by a singular run of good
luck I may have always been at a warm place when the weather was cold
elsewhere, but it is literally true that during that winter I never
once had occasion to put on an overcoat, excepting when I was in Canada
at its breaking up. I left New York early in January; went through the
South, where I gathered ripe oranges from the trees on which they were
hanging; ascended the Mississippi; crossed the prairies and plains to
the Rocky Mountains, at the foot of which I found the thermometer, at
Denver, standing at 70°; recrossed the prairies to Chicago; and during
the whole of this time, whether on foot, or in a railway car, or on
or in a coach, did not on any occasion find the weather disagreeable
on account of the cold, though I frequently found it in railway cars
and in hotels very much warmer than was agreeable. By what I have
just said I do not mean that I never fell in with weather that was
thermometrically cold, for I walked over the Mississippi on the ice at
St. Louis, but that it never felt disagreeably cold. It so happened
that whenever the thermometer was low, the air was still, and the sun
bright. During this winter it only rained twice, and never snowed but
once, at the places at which I happened to be staying. It rained once
at Washington, and once at New Orleans, and it was snowing on my return
across the prairies to Chicago. On my outward journey over them they
were entirely free from snow. Of course if I had remained during the
whole of this time at any one place in the northern part of the Union,
I should have seen some bad weather. My conclusion, however, is that
the traveller may so arrange his tour even for the winter as to be put
to very little annoyance by the cold or wet.

[Sidenote: _The Queen’s Book in America._]

Everybody in New York had read the Queen’s book; in every society
I found people talking about it; and I never heard it mentioned
without expressions of interest and approval, always uttered without
any qualifications, and with unmistakable heartiness. They said it
made royalty appear to them in a new and more human light, in which
they had never regarded it before. They spoke of her as the head of
the Anglo-Saxon race, almost as if they had as much part in her as
ourselves. I believe that her Majesty’s work has had a greater number
of readers, and that a greater number of copies of it have been sold,
in the United States than in the United Kingdom.

The exterior appearance of New York is at first disappointing. We
are accustomed to find in every capital we visit large and stately
buildings, which, as in the case of royal or imperial palaces, public
offices, and the hotels of a territorial nobility, are the results
of our own existing institutions; or, as in the case of cathedrals,
churches, town-halls, and castles, are the result of a state of things
belonging to the past history of Europe; and so when we walk through
the streets of a city larger than most European capitals, and find
none of the buildings we are in the habit of seeing everywhere else,
we condemn it as architecturally poor. This feeling is increased in
New York by the fact that there is nothing very striking in Broadway,
its main street, except its length. The shops, or stores as they are
called, are rendered externally quite ineffective by the narrowness
of their frontage, and by the way in which they are converted into an
advertising frame for names and announcements of various kinds. When
you get inside the door you find as extensive and rich an assortment
of goods as can be seen in the best shops of London or Paris: there
is, however, little indication of this from the outside. But a better
acquaintance with the city qualifies to a great extent this first
feeling of disappointment. It is irrational to condemn a place for
not having what it is impossible could ever have been there. New
York cannot have imperial palaces, or mediæval cathedrals, not even
great public offices; but in the part of the Fifth Avenue, and of the
contiguous streets, which is occupied with the residences of private
citizens, it is not surpassed by anything of the same kind in any city
of the world. Certainly Belgravia can show nothing like it. There is
no stucco, nor are the houses built, as is the case in our streets, in
rows of monotonous uniformity, but in some places each separate house
differs in design from its neighbours. Sometimes you may find three or
four that are alike, but seldom more than half a dozen; and probably
those that are alike in general design will vary in the ornamentation
of the doors and windows; thus indicating that they are not run up
to order, as in Paris, or on speculation, as in London, but that they
were built by the people who inhabit them. This variety of façade,
where nothing is mean, of course contributes very much to the effect of
street architecture. The materials, too, used for building in New York
are better and more varied than those used by ourselves. In the best
quarters a chocolate-coloured stone is the most common. Brick, which is
always painted, and dressed with stone, comes next in frequency; then
a stone which in colour is compounded of a yellowish-white with a very
perceptible trace of green. Some of the largest stores and hotels, and
occasionally a private residence and church, are of white marble. Of
this latter material is constructed the imposing office of the New York
Herald—I suppose the most magnificent newspaper office in the world.

[Sidenote: _New York._]

The great glory, however, of the city is its Park. It is on the central
ridge of the island—on very uneven ground, with the native rock
everywhere cropping up through the surface, and with many depressions,
in which are pieces of water peopled with various kinds of waterfowl;
it is between two and three miles in length, and is throughout kept
in faultless order; it has already cost the city twenty millions of
dollars, and is one of the more than imperial works of the American
democracy.

An English merchant, carrying on business at New York, and who had for
several years been the president of the St. George’s Society of that
city, and in that capacity brought very much into contact with the
English immigrants, assured me that he had often had to blush for the
ignorance of his countrymen. ‘Of all the immigrants,’ he said, ‘who
came to the United States the Englishman was the least educated, and so
the most shiftless. Even the wild Irishman had generally been better
taught, and knew more.’

[Sidenote: _Supplementary Schools._]

Among my letters of introduction for New York was one to a gentleman
who is personally and actively engaged in the working of some of the
most useful institutions of the city. Under his guidance I visited and
examined several of their industrial schools, in which the children of
the lowest and most vicious part of the Irish and German population
of the city are educated. Sixteen of these schools have already been
established, and are now at work. They do not at all enter into
competition with the common schools, but are a supplement to them,
occupying very much the place of our ragged schools. They are partly
supported by the city, and partly by voluntary contributions. This is
far better than that the city should take upon itself the whole of the
cost; because in that case everything would be done by paid agents,
who, as experience proves, are seldom able to establish an influence
over the classes for whose benefit these institutions are designed;
while good and Christian people are generally to be found, who will,
for love’s sake and for the work’s sake, go among the disorderly and
depraved, and endeavour to awaken whatever dormant sparks of parental
affection, of religious sentiment, and of the sense of responsibility
may remain within them, and will thus induce them to send their
children to school. And not only will these ministers of good words,
illustrated and expounded by kindly acts, aid the regular teachers in
bringing children into the school, but also in attaching them to the
place where they were first made comfortable and happy. In all these
schools I either found ladies actually present at the time of my visit,
or heard that they were in the habit of being present almost daily.
Their chief effort is to instil into the minds of the children a good
moral and religious tone, and to bring them to feel that there are
such things in human hearts as kindliness and regard for others, and
that this kindliness and regard is being directed towards themselves.
They also generally superintend the musical instruction, for which
purpose each school is supplied with an harmonium. It is thought that
music will both attract and humanise children accustomed at home to
so much roughness and coarseness. They also teach the girls to make
their own clothes; the materials for which, in the case of the poorest
and most neglected, are given either at the cost of the school funds,
or by some of the well-wishers of the school through these voluntary
assistants. This, and meals provided two or three times a week for the
most destitute, are used as allurements by which the most neglected
children, which are precisely the cases the managers are most desirous
of getting hold of, may be brought in.

None of the children found in these schools would ever attend
the common schools—their rags and habits would alone render them
inadmissible; and it is only by such means and exertions as I have just
mentioned that they can be attracted to and fitted for the industrial
schools. I was told that notwithstanding the success I witnessed,
there was still a lower depth that could not be reached, in which the
children remained untaught in the lessons of any school excepting that
of vice.

In these matters, then, they have in the great commercial capital of
the New World, where land is a drug, and where there are employment
and food for everybody, just the same difficulties we have to struggle
against in the capital of the old country, and they endeavour to meet
them much in the same way as ourselves; though perhaps they may set
about doing what they see ought to be done, with more system and energy
than we have yet shown.

The same gentleman also took me over the establishments of the
Children’s Aid Society. The object of this association is to collect
from the streets the newsboys, and any others who may be growing up
uncared for, and who have no prospect of being trained up to any
employment or trade by which they may gain an honest livelihood,
and by the inducement of comfortable lodgings, and some other
advantages, to get them to submit to regular habits, and to a certain
amount of instruction; and then, when they have become qualified
for such situations, to give them an outfit, and find them homes in
the farmhouses of the West. This institution was under my friend’s
superintendence. It appeared to be a very valuable one, and to be
effecting a great deal of good among a large class that could have no
other chance of being rescued from degradation, and launched favourably
into life. On each of my two visits to New York I saw a band of healthy
and hopeful-looking youths it had trained and taught, and had just
fitted out, on their way to the railroad which was to take them to
their new Western homes.

[Sidenote: _An Old Principle Resuscitated._]

I have mentioned these industrial schools and the Children’s Aid
Society in connection with my first visit to New York, because I did
not meet with institutions of this kind elsewhere. I shall say nothing
about the common schools I saw here, because as I had letters to the
superintendents of schools in all the chief cities I visited, and so
had opportunities for inspecting these schools wherever I went; and as
I intend to bring into one summary the conclusions I arrived at after
an inspection of schools from New York to Denver on the plains at the
foot of the Rocky Mountains, and from Denver back again to Boston, it
will be better that I should only make separate mention of my visits to
schools which appeared to possess some peculiarity of method or object.

‘We wish everybody to have a chance, and to enjoy life. We wish for
nothing for ourselves which we should not be glad to see others have.’
I first heard this sentiment enounced in the above words by a gentleman
whom I met in one of my visits to the Children’s Aid Society. I
afterwards heard it expressed by other persons in widely distant parts
of the Union. There is nothing new in the sentiment itself to those
who are familiar with a book for which deep reverence is professed on
both sides of the Atlantic; but I felt—perhaps I was wrong in feeling
so—that there was something new in hearing it proclaimed as a principle
of conduct, and in finding myself among people who in their system of
public education, in many of their charities, and in other matters,
distinctly acted upon it.

Few people can have visited the great and wealthy capital of the French
empire without being struck with the paucity of churches it contains.
Few can have visited New York, which is not even the capital of the
State whose name it bears, without being struck with the opposite
fact. The latter city abounds in churches, still I saw many additional
ones in course of construction. Many of these churches have cost large
sums of money, and are of good architectural designs. As a general
rule, those who minister in them are very liberally maintained: I was
astonished at hearing the amount of the annual collections in some of
them.

The clergy are allowed much freedom of expression in America. A
gentleman residing in New York, while conversing with me on this
subject, made the following statement of what he supposed was the
general practice:—‘The way in which we deal with the clergy here is to
pay them well, and to encourage them to say exactly what they think.
What we pay them for is not other people’s ideas and opinions—that
we can find in books—but their own. We expect them to devote a
reasonable portion of their time and all the mental powers they
possess to theological study, and then to give us the result.’ This
broad construction of the duty of a clergyman, as a religious teacher,
coincides very much with what I was frequently told, that the broad
way of thinking was becoming the common way of thinking in almost all
the American churches. Mr. Henry Ward Beecher, though a Presbyterian,
is very broad, and never has a seat empty in his church. Sunday after
Sunday, three thousand people assemble to hear him preach. In American
society religious questions are frequently discussed. No one feels any
disposition to avoid them, because expression of opinion is perfectly
free. An American lady once said to me across the table, and was heard
by everyone present, that ‘every thinking American was of opinion that
religion, if not in conformity with the knowledge and sentiments of
the times, was a dead thing.’ In New York this expression of opinion
appeared perfectly natural; but I suppose that if an English lady
entertained ideas of this kind, she would not think it allowable for
her to enunciate them in company.

[Sidenote: _Service at the Rev. H. W. Beecher’s Church._]

The most celebrated preacher in America is Mr. Henry Ward Beecher.
On the subjugation of the South he was the man selected by President
Lincoln from all the great speakers of the United States to pronounce
at Fort Sumter, where the war had commenced, an oration which would
signalise its conclusion with an eloquence worthy of the occasion. The
three thousand sittings his church contains, I was told, are let by
auction for sums which on this side of the water would appear fabulous.
He returns his income at 8,000_l._ a year. Of course I went to hear
him, and through the assistance of one of his congregation obtained a
seat.

The church is very much in the form of a theatre. The stage is occupied
by Mr. Beecher himself. Over the stage, however, is a gallery for
the organ and choir. There was not, on the occasion upon which I was
present, a vacant place in the building. As one looked down from what
corresponded with the gallery of a theatre, there appeared to be no
aisles in the body of the church, because as soon as the occupants
of the pews had taken their places, seats that had been fastened up
against the outside of the pews were opened out and instantly filled.
The service commenced with the Te Deum, chanted by a choir of ladies
and gentlemen. A short prayer was then offered. This was followed by
a short lesson from the book of Ecclesiastes, which was all that the
service contained from the Holy Scriptures. Six or seven children
were now baptised. The baptismal service consisted of several texts
bearing more or less on the subject, which were chanted by the choir,
Mr. Beecher afterwards sprinkling water upon each in the name of the
Trinity. This was succeeded by a long prayer, which was rather a
thanksgiving for domestic happiness than a prayer. A hymn was then
sung, during the singing of which very few of the vast congregation
rose from their seats. There was, of course, no kneeling during the
prayers, or in any part of the service, which was concluded with a
sermon of more than an hour’s length, taken from the few verses in
Ecclesiastes that had been previously read. The sermon was an essay on
‘the art of making old age happy and beautiful.’ This was in connection
with the administration of the sacrament of baptism. He spoke very
eulogistically of a certain admiral, whose name I could not catch, now
residing at Brooklyn, in the neighbourhood of Mr. Beecher’s church,
and whom the preacher announced as the specimen old man. He inveighed
strongly against all forms of dissipation, on the ground that ‘they
take too much out of a man. They are,’ he said, ‘cheques drawn by youth
on old age.’ He said ‘he had no objection to balls, provided they were
held in the middle of the day and in the open air.’ He should like to
see young people dancing on the green turf in summer. But crowded rooms
and late hours were prejudicial to health.’ He thanked God that he had
never used tobacco in any form. He said, ‘the use of it was a filthy,
beastly habit, wasteful of health and of animal power.’ In speaking of
excessive drinking, he said ‘that the American had not the excuse which
the Englishman had, for the latter had so much water outside, that
there was a reason for his never taking any inside.’ This was received
by the congregation with great laughter, as were some other sallies
contained in the sermon.

[Sidenote: _The Rev. H. W. Beecher._]

According to our ideas, there was a great want of reverence in the
service. People talked—some who were in my hearing, of dollars and
investments—till the service commenced. One of the officers of
the Church wore his hat till the congregation were more than half
assembled. Mr. Beecher appeared to me to have but two tones, a very
loud one and a quiet impressive one. The latter was very much the
better of the two. His manuscript was placed on a desk on the stage.
He could leave the desk with his manuscript on it whenever he pleased;
and this he frequently did. One has no right to express an opinion of
a preacher’s power after having heard only one sermon; all, therefore,
that I will say of Mr. Beecher is what I heard said of him. I was
told that his popularity never flagged, and that his originality had
hitherto proved inexhaustible; for that during the many years he had
been before the public, during which time everything he had said
had been reported, he had never been known to repeat himself. I was
also told that he had been a useful man in calming, as far as the
great influence he possessed allowed, the storms both of religious
controversy and of political animosity. It must be remembered that a
clergyman of Mr. Beecher’s energy and talents has much more prominence
and influence in America, where there is no governing class, than it
would be possible for him to attain in England.

There is a club—perhaps we should call it a society or association—of
Episcopalian Broad Churchmen, the members of which reside in the cities
of New York and Philadelphia. I believe clergymen only are members.

Almost every Episcopal church in New York has a chapel attached to
it, exclusively for the use of the poor. This has been done because
it has been found there, just as is the case with us, that in the
cities the poor will not use the same churches as the rich. We have in
London, in a few cases, attempted to cure the same evil with the same
remedy. The remedy, however, has not been fairly applied, for a better
class of persons (the very thing that indisposes the ill-clad poor
to be present) has been allowed to appropriate to themselves a large
proportion of the sittings in these chapels.

I will mention here a conclusion to which I was brought by my
observation of what was going on in the Episcopal Church in different
parts of the Union. Among ministers and congregations there are, just
as with us, some High Church, some Low Church, some Ritualistic, and
some Broad Church. I think the proportion of those that are High Church
is greater with them than with ourselves. The real and important
difference between us on this head is, that in the American Church
every minister and congregation belongs distinctly to one or other of
these parties, and that every Church is worked at high pressure.

[Sidenote: _An American’s Opinion of a Minister’s Duty._]

One of the leading divines of America whom I met at New York (he was
not a minister of the Episcopal Church) remarked to me that the view
taken in America of a minister’s duty was, that he was a teacher. He
occupied towards the adults of the congregation precisely the same
position that the schoolmaster held with respect to the children. What
he had to teach was the history and theory of religion; and to show
how, as a rule of life, it bore on the ever-varying circumstances of
the day. If he could not teach the people these things he was of no use
to them.

This ignores altogether that view of the service which makes it an
expression of the devotion and of the religious feelings of the
congregation itself.




CHAPTER III.

 WHY AN UNREASONABLE FANCY WAS ACTED ON—THE HISTORY OF THE CAUSE OF
 AMERICAN PROGRESSIVENESS—WHAT PASSES IN AMERICA IMPORTANT TO US—THE
 NORTHERN STATES SOWN BROADCAST WITH HOUSES.


I had had good times at New York, and I was rather eagerly looking
forward to good times at Washington, and so was somewhat disinclined to
tarry on the way thither. Still I thought it would be unwise to lose
an opportunity which offered itself for seeing something of the second
city of the Union, which lay upon my route. I therefore stopped at the
place, and having secured comfortable quarters at the best hotel (in
America there is a wider difference between the best and second-rate
hotels than there is elsewhere), I sallied forth to get some idea of
the external appearance of the town. There are occasions, it is said,
when imagination overpowers our judgment, and makes fools of us all.
I now became, I suppose, an illustration of this process. As I walked
along the streets they appeared to me distressingly straight. Their
nomenclature, too, was painfully dull and formal. This is a place,
I began to think, where men and women profess a form of virtue too
exalted for ordinary mortals. Such a city as this appears to be, must
be inhabited by people who are not so human as to err, nor so divine
as to forgive. If I had not been alone, it would probably have been
impossible for so groundless a fancy to have taken possession of my
mind. Still I was rational enough, when I had finished my breakfast
the next morning, to think of delivering some of my letters of
introduction. It seemed best to begin with one addressed to a gentleman
whose official position need not now be mentioned. On finding the house
I was in search of, I sent in my letter. The gentleman was not himself
at home, but his wife opened the letter, and sent out to say that she
would see me. I have not the slightest idea that she had any thought of
being rude or discourteous. If so, I should not say anything about what
passed; for then it would have been the only instance of discourtesy I
met with in my travels through the United States, and a single instance
of discourtesy would be obliterated by the recollection of helpfulness
and kindness everywhere else. It was, however, an instance of precisely
what my fancy had been suggesting of the kind of virtue which would be
the natural growth of the place. ‘Sir,’ said the lady, without asking
me to be seated, or taking a seat herself, and in a tone and with a
manner which proclaimed that she belonged to the order of beings who
cannot err, and who regard the disposition to forgive as one of the
weaknesses of ordinary mortals: ‘Sir, I will not attempt to conceal
from you that our feelings are completely changed towards Englishmen.
Formerly we used to think that England was always on the side of right.
But since we found that, during the late war, she sided with the
South, our opinion of England has been reversed; and the reversal of
our feelings has accompanied the reversal of our opinion.’

[Sidenote: _How a Fanciful Idea was Confirmed._]

‘Madam,’ I replied, ‘it is true that there were many in England who
felt towards the South, just as the schoolboy feels, while he reads
Homer’s “Iliad,” about Hector, when he finds him battling manfully
against destiny and a host of heroes. His sympathies, if he has any
generosity in his character, are naturally enlisted on behalf of the
brave man who is acquitting himself so well, and who must in the end he
overwhelmed.’

With these two little speeches the brief interview ended. For the
moment my fancies seemed hard and established facts. What could I gain
by remaining longer in such a place?—and so I left it by the first
train.

People look upon the progressiveness and enterprise of the Americans as
if it were something _sui generis_. This, however, is a mistake; the
difference is only one of degree, and not of kind. The character of the
American, just like every other product, whether in external nature
or in man, is the result of a chain of precedent events. In his case
the links of this chain can be traced back to dates and events long
anterior to the dawn of history, or even to the twilight of tradition,
but which, thanks to modern science, are not altogether irrecoverable.
Philology reveals to us that race of mankind to which the American
belongs, seated at a very remote date somewhere in Central Asia. As
there is no ground for supposing that it came from the South, which was
occupied by another and very different branch of the human family,
or from the West or the North, for reasons with which the philologist
and ethnologist will be familiar, we must conclude that if it had not
sprung from the soil, it must have come from a more distant east. If
then the Aryans of Central Asia had been the product of a migration, of
course only those had come who had had the enterprise and the hardihood
to go in quest of a new home. This then was the spirit which presided
over the race at its birth, and launched it upon its long career. Again
and again—we know not how often, for the records of history had not
yet begun—the same process must have been repeated. Of this hardy and
enterprising race, the most hardy and enterprising again renewed their
westward movement. All the while the characteristics of the advancing
race were being confirmed and strengthened; the infirm and feeble in
body or purpose were ever being left behind, and the primeval and now
hereditary impulse to move on at all risks was becoming in those who
from time to time sought new homes an ever-strengthening instinct.
At last—and this is when ordinary history first takes cognisance of
them—we find them settled on the southern and northern shores of the
Baltic.

[Sidenote: _The Cause of American Progressiveness._]

After a time the day arrives for another movement, for another
winnowing and sifting, far more searching than any of the previous
ones. Greater hardihood and enterprise are needed than were ever called
for in any of their past movements. The sea has now to be crossed—a new
form of danger to be confronted. Those who venture in their open and
half-open boats on this great enterprise, to establish a new home for
themselves on the other side of the storm-swept waste of waters, must
be men who know no fear, and in whom the instinct of moving onward is
irrepressible. The result of this supreme effort is the great English
nation—the product of all that is best in Angles, Jutes, Saxons,
Danes, and Northmen. Such was the long process by which the men were
formed who fought at Crecy, Poitiers, and Agincourt; at Blenheim, and
Ramilies, and Malplaquet; at Trafalgar, and at Waterloo; on the Ganges,
the Nile, and the St. Lawrence; who produced a Bacon, a Shakespeare,
and a Newton; who first tried men by their peers, and first governed
themselves by their representatives; who broke the papal yoke, and
established freedom of religion, of speech, of the press, and of
commerce. In their little island they proved themselves the grandest
race the world had seen.

But the great drama was not yet complete. The original impulse had
ever been gaining strength, and now appeared to culminate. But it was
not so. One more effort had to be made. In grandeur and hardihood it
transcended all that had yet been achieved. Not a narrow sea, but the
broad Atlantic had to be crossed; not a small island, but a new world
had to be occupied. The English race must itself be sifted, and none
but those who have nerve as firm as that of the Pilgrim Fathers, and
the most active instinct of progression, can take part in this mighty
enterprise. And so it comes to pass that America is peopled with that
which is most enterprising and progressive in that race in which these
qualities had been most highly developed. In these respects she
receives the cream of the cream, the purest selection of that which was
most select.

[Sidenote: _The Cause of American Progressiveness._]

The long series is now completed. The circuit of the world has been
made. The hardy, the inventive, the go-ahead American looks out on
the Pacific and towards that side of the old continent from which his
first ancestors started on the long career which in his person is now
consummated.

The like of this has not been done by any other race of men, or in
any other part of the world. In human history it is something quite
unique. It is the main stream in the history of man. All other series
of events—as, for instance, that which resulted in the culture of
mind in Greece, and that which resulted in the empire of Rome—only
appear to have purpose and value when viewed in connection with it,
or rather as subsidiary to it. Their true place in history is that of
affluents to this main stream. And even Christianity itself, which
so loudly proclaims its indifference to all national or ethnological
distinctions, and its equal regard for every branch of the human
family, while it has been rejected by the race to which it was first
revealed, has become to the more advanced parts of the Teutonic race,
in a greater degree than to any other people, their educator and their
strength.

A moment’s comparison of the tone in which we write and speak about
America with the tone in which we write and speak about other
countries, and of the feelings with which we regard what is passing
there with the feelings with which we regard what is passing elsewhere,
will show that we look upon American events as fraught with a greater
amount of good and of evil to ourselves, than what is happening in
all the world besides. Much, for instance, has of late been said and
written about what is called the resurrection of Italy, but who expects
from that resurrection anything that will affect either the hopes or
the fears of mankind? Everybody, however, feels that the future of
humanity will be greatly influenced by, and in no small degree depend
upon, what is going on in America. Or if we turn to that country which
has hitherto been more influential than any other in disturbing, or,
which it claims as its right, of directing the course of events on the
Continent of Europe, we do not find any causes now in operation which
we can suppose likely to result in improving the material circumstances
of the French petty proprietors, that is, of the bulk of the French
nation, or in giving them more freedom and intellectual energy than
they at present possess. The form and character of their government,
their church, the division of property that obtains among them, the
accepted arrangements and spirit of society, all tend to immobility.
In America everyone understands that the stream is all the other way.
Mental activity is universal. Public opinion is the opinion of those
who in the open arena of public discussion are able to influence the
greatest number; and public opinion sweeps away every obstruction.

[Sidenote: _The Northern States sown with Houses._]

The aspect of the country between Philadelphia and Baltimore took me
very much by surprise, as I suppose it would anyone whose previous
travels had been confined to Europe. I had imagined that old and
densely peopled countries, like England and France, must necessarily
present to the eye of the traveller an appearance of their being
more closely inhabited than a new country like America. But the very
reverse of this is the case, and most strikingly so. All the way from
Philadelphia to Baltimore I found the country sown with houses. This
arises from the fact that every 100 or 150 acres belong to a separate
proprietor (large estates being unknown) who has his house upon his
small farm, which he cultivates with his own hands and the assistance
of his family. As far as the eye can range over the country you see
these white farmhouses. And you may now see them all the way from New
York to Omaha on the Missouri, 500 miles beyond Chicago, and 1,500
from New York. The traveller in the United States generally derives
his idea of the wealth of the people from what he sees in the towns.
The rapidity of their growth, the amount of business done in them,
the dimensions of their shops, the goodly appearance of the houses of
their merchants, justify him in supposing that the Americans are a
very wealthy people. But all this wealth of the towns is in fact only
a measure of the wealth of the country. The towns become wealthy and
flourishing in proportion to the wealth of the country. These tens of
myriads, then, of farmhouses, each of which is evidently the home of
a well-to-do family, and of which one is never out of sight in the
settled districts of the North, are the truest and most interesting
indications of the nature and of the amount of the riches of the United
States.




CHAPTER IV.

 THE LOCOMOTIVE IN THE STREETS—IN BALTIMORE PUBLIC OPINION FIRST
 BECOMES SOUTHERN—GROWTH AND PROSPECTS OF BALTIMORE—ON TRADING
 POLITICIANS AND ILL WILL TO ENGLAND—WHY AN AMERICAN TUTOR THOUGHT
 NECESSARY FOR AN ENGLISHMAN—REPUDIATION—THE MASSES AND MIDDLE CLASSES
 IN FAVOUR OF IT—ARGUMENTS IN FAVOUR OF IT—AN ARGUMENT USED 2,000 MILES
 FROM WALL STREET—WHY REPUBLICANS BOUND TO REPUDIATE—AMERICANS ADDICTED
 TO ABSTRACT REASONING—INSTANCES.


We very often find a difficulty in getting our horses to take quietly
the sound of a railway train in motion. It was at Baltimore that I
first saw the locomotive dragging a train along the main street of a
city. All the precaution that was taken was merely to ring a bell on
the top of the engine to warn foot-passengers and drivers of carriages.
Many horses were passed, and many crossed the moving train, but I did
not observe that in any instance they took the least notice of it. I
afterwards saw the same arrangement at Chicago, at New York, and at
many other places, and did not anywhere hear that accidents resulted
from it.

[Sidenote: _A Marylander’s Opinion of Government._]

Baltimore was the first place in which I found the general sentiment
strongly Southern. Balls and bazaars were being got up, while I was
there, for the openly avowed purpose of collecting funds to support
those families in the South which had been reduced to poverty by the
late war. This made me feel as if I were among another people; for in
the North I had heard the South spoken of very vindictively, as ‘that
they needed more suffering to take their pride out of them;’ and ‘that
nothing could be done with the South till the present proprietors had
all been swept away, and Northern men substituted for them.’ I am not
aware, however, that I ever heard any remarks of this kind made by
persons whom we should describe as of the upper class.

There has been a large emigration to Baltimore, from the States of the
late Southern Confederacy, of people who would not live under negro
domination as long as they had the means of living elsewhere. Many
Northern men also had lately settled there, in expectation that the
business of the place would rapidly increase. As it has a fine harbour,
and the development of the railway system is now connecting it with the
whole of the interior, there appears to be no reason why it should not,
at no very distant day, become a dangerous rival of Philadelphia and
even of New York. I understood that as many as 4,000 houses were built
here in the last twelve months.

‘Sir,’ said a Maryland planter to me, ‘many Americans, of whom I am
one, think that the English government is the best in the world. No
system of government which, like ours, can breed nothing better than
trading politicians, can be either generous or just; and must sooner or
later fall, overwhelmed by the hatred of some and the contempt of other
sections of the community.’ The same gentleman was of opinion that the
animosity felt towards England after the revolutionary war had now
almost died out among native-born Americans; for instance, there is,
he said, not one Fenian lodge in the whole of New England. Whatever
ill-will there may be existing at present originates in the Irish, and
radiates from them, if in any instances it has spread beyond them. An
Englishman who had been long settled in America, and who took part in
the conversation, thought differently. He was of opinion, that at all
events a strong prejudice existed in the minds of native-born Americans
against the English.

While at dinner at my hotel, a gentleman who was seated opposite to
me—he was one of the few stout men, I believe the only one, I saw in
America—accosted me with the remark ‘that he could not believe what he
understood me to say, that I had not yet been a month in the country,
because’—for this was his reason—‘I spoke the language so well. Or if
I am to believe it,’ he went on, ‘I suppose you had an American tutor
to teach you our language.’ I assured him that he had understood me
rightly, and that I had never had the advantage of the instruction he
considered necessary, nor was there such a great difference between the
language of America and that of England as to make Englishmen feel the
need of American tutors. ‘That, sir,’ he replied, ‘is by no means in
accordance with my experience. I have myself conversed with Englishmen,
and found their language very unlike our own. They seldom know where
to use and where not to use the initial H. And their language is full
of ungrammatical and vulgar expressions, from which ours is entirely
free.’

[Sidenote: _The Language of America._]

This gentleman’s mistake can be easily explained; and the explanation
will show that it is one into which an American may very possibly fall.
It is a remarkable fact that the English spoken in America is not only
very pure, but also is spoken with equal purity by all classes. This in
some measure, of course, results from the success of their educational
efforts, and from the fact which arises out of it that they are, almost
to a man, a nation of readers. But not only is it the same language
without vulgarisms, in the mouths of all classes, but it is the same
language without any dialectical differences over the whole continent.
The language in every man’s mouth is that of literature and of society;
spoken at San Francisco just as it is spoken at New York, and on the
Gulf of Mexico just as on the great lakes. It is even the language of
the negroes in the towns. There is nothing resembling this in Europe,
where every county, as in England, or every province and canton, has
a different dialect. Of this the philological observer I was dining
with was ignorant. He only knew that all Americans spoke uniformly one
dialect. He naturally therefore supposed that all Englishmen must do
the same; and as his acquaintance with Englishmen was confined to poor
immigrants, he imagined that their dialect was the language of all
Englishmen.

Often, in parts of the country most remote from each other, in wooden
shanties and the poorest huts, I had this interesting fact of the
purity and identity of the language of the Americans forced on my
attention. And at such times I thought, not without some feelings of
shame and sorrow, of the wretched vocabulary, consisting of not more
than three or four hundred words, and those often ungrammatically used,
and always more or less mispronounced, of our honest and hard-working
peasantry. As language is the vehicle of ideas, these poor fellows have
not been fairly used, and are being deprived of a large portion of the
rich intellectual patrimony of Englishmen.

[Sidenote: _Will the Debt be Paid?_]

Before I went to America, I felt as certain as one can feel about any
future event, that the Americans would pay every cent of their debt. I
think still they possibly may. For their own sakes and for the honour
of the race I hope they will. But I am not now so positive on this
point as I was. Wherever it was allowable in conversation, I introduced
the subject of the debt. At first, to my surprise (but after a time
I got so accustomed to the expression of the sentiment that I should
have been surprised had I heard anything to the contrary), I never met
a single person in railway cars, or in hotels, who was in favour of
complete payment. Many were in favour of complete repudiation; but far
the greater number advocated the plan of immediate payment, by an issue
to the public creditors of, as I heard it sometimes put, cartloads of
greenbacks. This, of course, would not be very far from repudiation
pure and simple: though nominally a payment in full, it would really
be only the payment of a few shillings in the pound, as so large an
issue would enormously depreciate the value of the greenbacks. This is
the plan of Mr. Pendleton of Ohio, who is now the democratic candidate
for the next presidency. It must therefore be approved generally by
his supporters. The people, at a knowledge of whose sentiments I
arrived in the way I have just mentioned, belonged chiefly, I suppose,
to the class of storekeepers and travelling traders; though I have
sometimes heard persons whose position I knew was better announce
the same opinions. On the other hand, however, I never met with any
flourishing and respectable merchant, and I may almost say with anyone
whom we should describe as belonging to the upper class of society, who
admitted for a moment the possibility of repudiation in any form. It
seems, then, that in forecasting the probabilities of this question,
the class that has numbers on its side must be regarded as pitted
against the class that has on its side cultivation, intelligence, and
wealth. But even from these few, some, as was once observed to me,
ought probably to be discounted; because it is possible that some may
be making a cheap profession of honesty, which they know will not, and
have no wish ever should, be acted on. And the more certain they may
feel of ultimate repudiation, the louder they may declare themselves
in favour of payment. The South, whenever it shall have resumed its
place in the councils of the Union, will, as most people seem to
think, be in favour of the use of the sponge; for how can people be
expected to tax themselves to pay for what was the instrument of their
humiliation, conquest, and ruin? The question, then, between payment
and repudiation, complete or partial, cannot now be decided so clearly
and peremptorily against the latter as one could wish.

Of course the argument most commonly used against payment is, that it
necessitates such a burden of taxation as is no longer tolerable, that
it is impoverishing the whole community, destroying both the home and
the foreign trade, and pressing with peculiar and insupportable weight
on the humbler classes.

Again, it is urged by many that the amount of their taxation is the
one undoubted cause, both of the cost and of the corruption of their
government. If they go back to their old amount of taxation, there will
be no work for, and, what will be more to the purpose, no funds to
maintain, these armies of official bloodsuckers.

I found, too, that there was floating before the minds of some an
entrancing vision of what would be the wealth of the country if
production were cheapened and trade revived, and if everybody had twice
as much money to spend as at present.

Another argument I frequently heard, was made to rest on an attempt to
separate in idea the bondholders and public creditors of all kinds from
the people; and while it spoke of them as an extremely wealthy class,
living in luxury, and doing nothing (a very unrepublican position for
anyone to occupy), it suggested the idea that their wealth was derived
from the burdens, that is to say, the sufferings, of the masses of
the people, who, all the while, were struggling very hard for a bare
subsistence. The object of this comparison is to make the bondholder
an object of odium, and the tax-payers of the humbler classes objects
of commiseration, in the hope that by so doing a rankling sense of
injustice might be implanted in the breast of the latter.

[Sidenote: _Arguments for Repudiation._]

At an hotel in a town on the very frontiers of civilisation, two
thousand miles away from Wall Street, I heard the question of ‘to pay
or not to pay’ debated, and the conclusion in favour of the latter
alternative was clinched by the proof of the impossibility of paying.
The speaker was an ex-judge, and was a man who spoke and reasoned
well,—I mean in such a way as to carry his hearers along with him. His
argument on this point was very concise. ‘Just before the war,’ his
words were, ‘the Government of the United States published a return,
collected by its own officers, of the value of all the property of
the people of the United States. The correctness of this return is
unquestioned. We know from it both the saleable value of the property
of the people and the annual income of that property. The property of
the whole people is for purposes of taxation a single estate, but the
debt we have incurred, plus the capital represented by our ordinary
taxation, is greater in amount than the value of the whole of the
property of the people of the United States; and the interest to be
paid on the debt, plus the taxation required for other purposes,
general and local, is greater than the income of the property of the
whole people. And as no private estate can carry a debt greater in
amount than the value of the estate, so no country can bear burdens
that represent a property, if they were capitalised, greater than the
property of the country, and an annual amount of taxation greater
than the income of that property. I will not say, then, that the debt
must be repudiated, for that would imply that we had some option in
the matter; I will only say that it is impossible that it should be
paid, either capital or interest. The estate can’t do it. It is an
impossibility.’ Both the statements of this argument and the inference
drawn from them appeared to the audience unquestionable. There was a
murmur of assent, and conviction was expressed on every face.

I will report the firing off of one more shot against the payment
of the debt which I was so fortunate as to witness. It is worth
mentioning, both for the sake of the _entourage_ and because it
involves a style of argument I found very frequently used, and with
convincing effect, among the people of the United States.

[Sidenote: _Arguments for Repudiation._]

The Governor of ——, one of the largest States in the Union, had been so
good as to invite me to call upon him, that I might be introduced to
some friend of his who would be with him on the following day. On being
shown into the reception-room, I found the Governor seated in a kind
of state, with his back to the fire and his feet on the table. On the
opposite side were seated in a row eight or ten persons. They appeared
to be a deputation from some town or association, who were then having
an interview with the Governor. When the interruption caused by my
entrance was over, a tall grey-headed man who had been speaking as I
entered resumed his argument. He had rather the look of a well-to-do
farmer, not of our stolid type, but of the keen American type. He
was quick and incisive in his style of speaking, and dealt much with
interrogatories, as is common with persons who have been mastered by
an idea, and cannot but think that it must appear to others just in
the light in which it appears to themselves. He proceeded:—‘What I want
to know is, whether this is not a republic?’ He looked round, and was
satisfied with the amount of apparent assent. ‘The next thing I would
ask is, what is the meaning of a republic?’ No one was prepared with
an answer, and so he proposed one himself. ‘A monarchy is a government
where everything is contrived for the advantage of an individual. An
aristocracy is a government where everything is contrived for the
advantage of a few. But a republic is a government in which whatever
is for the advantage of the greater number either is or ought to be
law. And now I ask another question: would it not be for the advantage
of the greater part of the citizens of this State, and for the greater
part of the citizens of the United States, that we should have no
debt?’ This was an unassailable position; and so he at once proceeded
to the conclusion. ‘Well then, I say, that if this is a republic there
ought to be a law passed to free us from this debt. If we are not
repudiators we are not republicans.’ I am unable to report any other
arguments that were urged by the deputation, for at this point the
Governor conducted me into another room.

The method of reasoning contained in the gaunt old gentleman’s argument
against the payment of debts by republicans is, as I observed, very
frequently used and very well received in the United States. It is
worth noticing, because it is a method that is seldom used and never
accepted on this side the water. It proceeds by assuming the truth
of some abstract propositions, of which neither truth nor falsehood
can properly be predicated, but which a half-instructed audience is
always ready to accept, and then goes on to apply them to some question
on which they appear to have a bearing, and which happens to be
interesting at the moment. For instance, I was speaking on the subject
of negro suffrage with one of the leading supporters of that concession
in the South. An Englishman would probably have confined himself to the
consideration of the fitness of the African for so important a part in
the government of the country. My American friend contented himself
with a kind of numerical formula. ‘Suppose,’ he said, ‘the grown-up
male population of the country is represented by the number 100. By
excluding the negroes from the franchise, you reduce the voters to
about one-half, that is 50. But, in a constituency of 50, a majority of
26 will rule. That is to say, 26 will rule 100. That is bad, but it is
not all the evil of the restriction. In small bodies it is generally
found that one resolute mind takes the lead. The result therefore would
be that one would rule the 100. All this would be the consequence of
departing from the simple republican rule of giving the vote equally
to all.’ The gentleman had this formularised argument in favour of the
admission of the African to equal political power with the white race
drawn out on a paper, which he took from his pocket-book and showed
me—I quite believe, with the idea that I should find it unanswerable.
It was all in vain that I pointed out to him that his argument was so
abstract that it omitted all consideration of every one of the actual
conditions of the question. He himself was thoroughly persuaded of its
conclusiveness.

[Sidenote: _Americans addicted to Abstract Reasoning._]

Another argument of just the same kind, but which aimed at the opposite
conclusion, was frequently urged upon me. ‘Have you read,’ I was asked,
‘Bishop ——’s book?’ I forget the name of the ingenious prelate. ‘He
has demonstrated that the negro is not a man. No human being was saved
from the Flood except Noah’s family, and it is quite impossible that he
could have had a negro son. The negro must therefore at that time have
been regarded as a brute beast. And as Noah was acting under Divine
guidance, he could not have been wrong in his estimate of the negro.
And the negro cannot be any better now than he was then, for a brute
beast can never become a man. We therefore are justified in looking
upon him just as Noah looked upon him, and in supposing that he is of
the gorilla race, only a little improved.’

I do not mean that a well-educated American would be at all more
disposed to accept this kind of argument than a well-educated
Englishman, but that it goes down with multitudes of Americans who have
from their youth up had very little time for acquiring any knowledge
but that of their business, yet feel themselves called on by the
circumstances of American life to form and express opinions on almost
every subject; and this is a call to which few are slow in responding.




CHAPTER V.

 WASHINGTON—STYLE OF SPEAKING IN CONGRESS—CONGRESS NO NURSERY FOR
 STATESMEN—SOCIETY IN WASHINGTON—EPISCOPAL CHURCH IN WASHINGTON—SOME
 OPINIONS OF AN AMERICAN BISHOP—COMMISSIONER OF AGRICULTURE—USE OF
 THE DEPARTMENT—ITS MUSEUM GIVES AN IDEA OF THE VASTNESS OF THE
 COUNTRY—ITS NATURAL ADVANTAGES—WHAT VARIETY OF PRODUCTIONS HAS
 DONE FOR ENGLAND WILL BE REPEATED IN AMERICA—SPECIAL EXCELLENCE
 OF CALIFORNIAN PRODUCTIONS—THE CALIFORNIAN HIMSELF—CALIFORNIA
 COMPARED WITH ITALY—WHY COLOURED WAITERS PREFERABLE TO WHITE—NEGRO
 FUNERAL WITH MASONIC HONOURS—AMERICAN BIRDS’ NESTS—BILL FOR MAKING
 EDUCATION COMPULSORY—COLOURED SCHOOLS—COMPARATIVE INTELLIGENCE OF THE
 NEGRO—VULGAR ERRORS ABOUT AMERICANS—NIGHT ATTENDANTS AT HOTEL READ
 ‘OLIVER TWIST’—CAPITOL—TREASURY—PATENT OFFICE—WHAT OUR DIPLOMACY IN
 AMERICA SHOULD BE—USE OF ICED WATER.


While at Washington I was frequently present at the debates in both
Houses. I was not much impressed by the style of speaking either in the
Senate or in the Chamber of Representatives. I heard much good common
sense, and many of the attacks and defences which are necessary in
party warfare, but I heard no eloquence, and nothing even that on this
side we should call good speaking. Where eloquence was attempted, it
seemed to me to result in declamation. I went away with the idea that
both senators and representatives spoke, not like persons who were in
the habit of addressing cultivated audiences, but whose style had been
formed by the practice of canvassing-speeches and mob-oratory.

[Sidenote: _Congress no Nursery for Statesmen._]

The most striking difference between our parliamentary system and
the American Congress is, that ours is as perfect a school as is
conceivable for statesmanship, while theirs can never be anything of
the kind, except accidentally and in a very slight degree. With us
a man who is destined for public life enters Parliament while still
young. If there is anything in him, he is generally able to retain
his seat. Thus he is all his life through learning the routine of
administrative practice and the science of statesmanship. All along
every word he utters is set down in black and white, to stand in
evidence for or against him, and to be weighed by the House and by the
public. And it is the opinion of the House and public, thus formed,
that assigns him his place in the hierarchy of party. If he is capable
of becoming a statesman, with time and training he becomes one. If the
House and the country know that he has shown himself one of the ablest
men of his party, high office is his right. He has to thank no one for
it but himself. If he has proved himself the ablest man of his party,
the first place is his. He has established his claim to it in the face
of the world. Nothing of this kind goes on in the American Congress.
It may be said to have no personal continuity. A large proportion of
Congress—and this happens every fourth year—are new men, thrown up to
the surface by the action of local political causes in their respective
States; and most of these new men will themselves be superseded by
other new men in the ensuing Congress. The idea of forming statesmen
does not at all enter into the aim of the American Congress; it hardly
seems to regard itself as standing in need of statesmanship, wherever
and however acquired. It is rather a machine for ascertaining and
carrying out the opinions of the people. A successful local politician,
be he a grocer or a shoemaker, a rail-splitter or a tailor, will find
his way into the Senate.

The society of Washington, while Congress is sitting, is remarkable
for its great variety. There are the heads of the civil and
military departments with their subordinates; and the senators and
representatives from all parts of the Union, from California, the
great West, the highly educated States of New England, and from the
commercial and manufacturing States of New York and Pennsylvania.
At present we have only to regret the absence of the gentlemen of
the South. Many of these persons bring with them their families. The
society thus formed is not so vast as that anyone should be lost in
it; nor is there much tendency to break up into sets. The influence of
the White House, which acts as a centre, and the practice of general
receptions, which is universal among official people and persons of
distinction, prevent isolation. The variety just mentioned in the
component parts of the society of Washington is very perceptible, and
contributes largely to its interest and picturesqueness. The only
difference I observed between the manners of these republicans and our
own, was that they were easier and less constrained than we are; for
no one is haunted with the idea of maintaining or of establishing a
position, because no one supposes himself better than anybody else;
they appeared, too, to possess, in a greater degree than is common
among us, that great requisite of good breeding, the double facility
of being pleased and of pleasing. I would only add that there seem to
be few dull people in American society. There is with them more general
animation and _enjouement_ of life than with us.

[Sidenote: _Episcopal Church at Washington._]

On attending morning service at the Church of the Epiphany at
Washington, I found on the seat a printed paper containing a letter
from the congregation to the minister, announcing that they begged
that for the future he would consent to receive an increase to his
salary, raising it to £800 a year; and one from the minister to the
congregation, thanking them for their liberality. In addition to this
salary they had presented him with a furnished house.

Washington, with a population of 120,000, has in the city eight
Episcopal churches, and four in the suburb of George Town. There were
when I was there two additional congregations in process of formation.
At that time they were meeting in an upper room, but it was expected
that they would soon be strong enough to build churches for themselves,
and to become fully organised. An effort is being made to obtain a
bishop for the district of Columbia, and, if possible, to get the
consent of the bishops to his being made an archbishop and metropolitan
of the American Church.

At the service I attended, there was not a seat vacant in the Church of
the Epiphany; but they were all filled with well-dressed persons. In
the afternoon of the same Sunday I went to the church of St. John’s, to
be present at a Bible class held by the Adjutant-General of the United
States army, a man whom any church might be thankful to have among
its members, and to hear the catechising conducted by the rector. The
children catechised were those of the upper class, for here also I
found no ill-dressed people among the congregation. In the evening I
went to Trinity Church, where I was told I should see a congregation
of the humbler classes. I heard a clergyman conduct the service and
preach, who I thought possessed just the qualities which would adapt
him for obtaining an influence over those classes, but I saw very few
of them in the church.

As I am not aware that any bishop of the American Episcopal Church
was at Washington while I was there, I will take this opportunity for
offering to the consideration of English Churchmen some remarks that
were made to me elsewhere by an American bishop. I run the risk of
doing this without permission, because I believe that here at home we
are far too ignorant of, not to say indifferent about, what is passing
in the minds and hearts too of our American brother-churchmen. He
thought that the Episcopal Church in America was the natural, or at all
events now the chief, bond of union between the old country and the
United States. With very few exceptions, and they are exceptions that
are not worth considering, the Episcopalians cherish the recollections
of the old country most fondly; whereas it is notorious that the
American churches which are connected with English dissent are more
or less actuated by feelings, if not of animosity, yet certainly of
coldness towards the old country.

[Sidenote: _Some Remarks of an American Bishop._]

The Episcopal Church is a great power in the United States, and is
more respected, and more influential in forming and guiding public
opinion than even the government and legislature. Its members comprise
the great bulk of the most refined and educated class in the country.
Those who join us from that class come to us because they regard
Romanism as a religion not for men, but only for women and children,
while they look upon the other churches as having little devotion and
less stability.

The Episcopal Church was opposed to the late war, and though pressure
was put upon it, it would not give in to the fierce mania of the
moment. This was the case in both sections.

The clergy of the different churches, but more particularly of the
Episcopal Church, are, in the existing state of things on this
continent, the natural and only aristocracy. The lawyers come next.
The politicians are nowhere. The American people have had plenty of
time and opportunities enough for weighing the latter, and have found
them wanting in everything for which man respects his fellow-man: all
the while their respect for the clergy of the Episcopal Church has
constantly been becoming deeper.

The five Yankee States, with the exception of Connecticut, which is the
most Episcopal State in the Union, are rapidly becoming Unitarian and
Universalist. This in some degree accounts for the equivocal character
of their acuteness, and for their singular want of magnanimity.

When he was in England, he was struck with the fact that the members
of the Government took no notice of the American bishops. In this they
showed their ignorance of the public mind in America. They also showed
their disregard of the advance of the church to which they profess to
belong. He did not suppose they neglected them because they were afraid
of giving offence to the other religions communities of America, but
simply because they were ignorant about America, and careless about
their own church.

The Americans, being a practical people, have established, in
connection with the general government at Washington, a department
of agriculture, presided over by a commissioner. One of the objects
of this department is to form a perfect museum of the agriculture of
the United States. This is the act of a practical people, because as
America is a new country, in the process of settlement, there must
always be immigrants starting, some for one locality and some for
another, who are in need of information as to what kinds or varieties
of grain, vegetables, and fruit would be most suitable for the soil
and climate of their proposed new home; and as to the best methods of
cultivation for each crop; and what will be the difficulties they will
have to contend with, and what have been ascertained to be the best
remedies for these evils. It is possible that each year the value of
the information distributed throughout the Union by this department may
be many times greater than the cost of the department. If so, the cost
is a small price to pay for a very great advantage.

My reason, however, for mentioning this museum of agriculture, is that
it contributes very much towards making distinct in one’s mind the
idea of the vast extent of the territory of the United States, and its
great range of climate. This it does by ocular demonstration. Here are
collected into one view specimens of the agricultural and horticultural
produce of every State in the Union, from Maine to Florida, and from
Massachusetts to California. These specimens range through all the
products of the temperate regions of the earth, and descend far down
into the list of the products of tropical climes. All the cereals we
grow in this country, Indian corn in many varieties, the grape, every
description of European fruit—in some cases, as in that of the apple,
greatly improved by its transference to America—tobacco, rice, the
sweet potato, the sugar-cane, the orange, the banana, ending with the
cocoa-nut of the South of Florida.

[Sidenote: _Natural Advantages of the United States._]

Here is a region larger than the whole of Europe, which if it were
transferred to the part of the globe which Europe occupies, only
retaining its latitude, would reach down to the Sahara of Africa,
covering the whole of the Mediterranean. This vast territory contains
an inland navigation which is the grandest in the world, and has in no
way taxed the labour of man. From its extremest point at the north, at
the head of the navigable stream of the Missouri, to its southern point
at New Orleans, there is an open course of three thousand miles without
a single break, a distance as great as the space which separates London
from Timbuctoo, or from Bokhara. And this main artery of communication,
the value of which is enhanced a thousand fold by the fact that it
runs from north to south, enabling the produce of so many climes to be
exchanged, instead of running along the same line of latitude, where
there would be little or nothing to exchange, is supplemented on the
right and left by 23,000 miles more of the natural navigation of its
great affluents. And the vast valley which this system of rivers opens
to traffic and travel is so extensive and fertile that it could support
the whole population of Europe, and probably will support some day as
large a population in far greater material well-being, and with far
more highly cultivated intelligence.

If everything throughout this vast territory had been arranged by the
most intelligent of mankind, with a view solely to the convenience
of its inhabitants, we cannot imagine how it could have been made to
contribute to those ends in a higher degree than it does at present.
Not only is it capable of producing to a practically unlimited extent
every plant that man cultivates, but it is also inexhaustibly rich
in the precious and the useful metals, and in mineral fuel. The
configuration too of the continent is such as to aid man in many ways
in subduing and utilising the soil, for on each side of the grand
central valley rises a long range of mountains, the one descending to
the Pacific, the other to the Atlantic, which give birth to multitudes
of rivers, which connect these vast districts with the two oceans, and
supply harbours for carrying on intercourse with all the world.

[Sidenote: _A Consequence of Variety of Productions._]

One of the causes that has most contributed to the wealth and
commercial aptitude of the inhabitants of the old country is, that
the productions of no two districts in it are precisely similar. The
districts, for instance, that breed cattle and sheep are not always
those that fatten them, and never those that consume them. So with
cereals, one district is good for wheat, another for barley, another
for oats, another for beans and peas. Fish that is taken on the coast
is consumed in the interior. A similar remark may be made of the
various kinds of minerals with which different parts of the island have
been enriched. Even the granite of Scotland is wanted in London for its
streets. Every town must get its flag-stones from a distance. Each
kind of manufacture has certain requirements which render one district
more suitable for it than another; so that for the article produced in
each manufacturing locality there must be trade between that locality
and all others. Hence it comes about that there is a larger interchange
of home productions in this country than in any other in the world.
In this respect compare Italy with ourselves. All its districts have
much the same productions; the result of which is the minimum of home
trade. How enormous must be the differences which must result to Italy
and ourselves from this dissimilarity in our respective circumstances!
I apply this to the United States of America. The cause which has
contributed so much to make us wealthy, intelligent, and commercial,
is to be found in the United States—with the difference, however, that
what has been done here on a very small scale, is there done, and has
yet to be done, on an enormous scale. Their variety of products is
far greater than ours, and will have to be exchanged to far greater
amounts, and so will employ a proportionately greater number of agents.
What a vast traffic will it be when the wheat consumed throughout the
Union shall be supplied by what are now the North-western States and
California, and the mutton and beef shall be supplied by the Western
prairies, and the pork by the maize-growing States, and the various
metals, precious and useful, and the different forms of manufacture,
each by different localities to all the rest!

This Museum of Agriculture and Horticulture gives one the means of
comparing the size and quality of the fruits, vegetables, and cereals
grown in different parts of the Union. The effects of climate and
soil are, as might have been expected, very perceptible. A variety of
the apple, for instance, that produces very large and good fruit in
Illinois and Michigan, will deteriorate as one goes farther south, till
at last it becomes not worth cultivating; while one sees specimens of
other varieties, which their nature adapts to the sunnier States. The
variety and excellence of the produce of the whole country is very
striking, for everywhere in the United States there is light and heat
enough and to spare; but what strikes one most of all is, the peculiar
and extraordinary excellence of everything that comes from California;
for instance, the pear La Belle Angevine, without any of the minute
attention that is bestowed on its culture in France, very commonly
attains the almost incredible weight of between three and four pounds.
And all other kinds of fruit, and every kind of vegetable, grow in
the same luxuriant manner. This is something that must be seen to
be believed; but when seen, it enables one to understand how in the
short space of twenty years this State has passed from an uninhabited
wilderness to one of the richest and most powerful States in the Union.
With such a climate and soil, to say nothing of its enormous mineral
wealth, ‘it is bound,’ to use the local word, to leave New York, and
Pennsylvania, and all the old leading States of the Union far behind,
and, indeed, every other part of the world, whether new or old.

[Sidenote: _California compared with Italy._]

One cannot become acquainted with half-a-dozen Californians without
seeing that man himself has been improved in this wonder-working
region—the finest, not only that the Anglo-Saxon race, but that any
race of man has ever inhabited. There is a quickness and determination
of mind, and a calmness of manner, a quickness of eye and a cleanness
of limb about a Californian that you cannot but notice. They have
in a thousand ways shown enterprise which astonishes even Americans
themselves. But in nothing have they shown it to such an incredible
degree as in their agriculture. Their wines are of many kinds, as may
be seen in this museum, and some of them are very good. Their garden
produce is quite unrivalled. But I will only mention what they have
done in the culture of wheat. Twenty years ago there was no agriculture
in this State. Twenty years are not time enough here to enable us to
make up our minds as to whether we will use the steam-plough. But in
these twenty years the clear-sighted and undaunted Californian has
learnt how to grow enough wheat to feed the inhabitants of his own
State, and in a great degree of the neighbouring States of Oregon and
Washington, and the whole population of our British Columbia. And not
content with this, he has undertaken the supply of Chili and Peru, and
the other republics on the seaboard of the Eastern Pacific. This comes
to a great deal—to what is almost beyond belief. To the Californian,
however, it is nothing at all. He has for several years been sending
wheat the length of the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans to England. Eight
years ago, I saw cargoes of Californian wheat selling at a profit
in Liverpool. And last year he capped even this, for he sent both
flour and wheat to New York, selling the former at eleven dollars a
barrel—that is, two dollars a barrel cheaper than the great millers
of Richmond can afford to lay it down at, whose mills are, as it were,
just outside the gates of New York. And the latter they sold at a price
which, had there been enough of it, would have completely excluded
Chicago and the great wheat-producing States of the North-west from the
market, and so would have swept away, at a single stroke, the chief
part of the business of the great Erie Canal.

Any little change at our own door appears great to us, while the
mightiest changes at a distance affect us little: if, however, we
are disposed to weigh events in accordance with their intrinsic
and real importance, we might compare the rising of the star of
this extraordinary community with the lately recovered unity and
independence of Italy, which has of late engrossed so much of our
attention and interest. California at the present moment contains a
population of between six and seven hundred thousand souls—Italy one
of twenty-four millions. But if the old Nation and the new State were
to try their strength against one another, I believe that this handful
of keen-witted and intrepid men would go just where they pleased, and
do just what they pleased in any part of Italy; while the Italians,
however much of their strength they might put forth, would find
themselves quite unable to do anything of the kind with California. How
much would a Californian population of twenty-four millions make of
Italy! They would have no armies of officials, no brigandage, no debt;
their ships would sail on every sea; their influence would be felt all
over Europe and throughout the world.

[Sidenote: _Coloured Waiters._]

At Washington, as at Philadelphia and Baltimore, I found the waiters
at the hotels were coloured men. I very much preferred this to having
the white waiters I had fallen in with at the Fifth Avenue Hotel in New
York: the latter, I thought, felt the degradation of their position.
In America, waiting in hotels and railway cars, being domestic
servants, and keeping barbers’ shops, are the only employments, with
the exception of field-labour in the South, which are really left
open to the coloured race. For a white man, therefore, to become a
waiter at an hotel, is to sink himself to the level of the black. It
is impossible to conceive a native American placing himself in such a
situation. It is too poor an employment for him; it is of a servile
character; and it is one which, in public opinion and by general
practice, has been assigned to the African. Even here, in England,
one pities the man whom circumstances have made a footman—when one
sees the hosts of men occupied in this way in London and elsewhere,
and compares what they are, and their sad prospects, with the fine
manly fellows they might have been, and the independence they might
have secured for themselves and their children in Canada, the Western
States, Brazil, on the Rio Plata, in Natal, Australia or New Zealand,
or in other places where the climate is fine, land a drug, and the only
thing wanted is men who can work as Englishmen and their descendants
alone can and do. The feelings, however, of commiseration with which
in England we regard the man whom circumstances have placed in such
a position, become in America dashed with somewhat of contempt for
the whites who voluntarily place themselves in it. One does not feel
in the least degree in this way towards the coloured waiters. It is
not in the nature of the black that he should ever work hard enough
to cultivate the soil, where the climate is such that the European
is capable of labouring in it. He has it not in him to become, and
never has become, a settler. One cannot imagine half-a-dozen negroes
voluntarily submitting for half-a-dozen years to the incessant toil—the
ploughing, the sowing, the weeding, the harvesting, the threshing,
the cattle-tending of a Northern farm. It is not only that they are
constitutionally lazy, but that they are also of too volatile a
disposition for such a life. Nature, however, has fitted them for such
employments as domestic service and waiting in hotels. In their case
there is an obvious congruity between the employment and the person.
When you thank the willing and cheerful black for changing your plate,
or ministering in some way to your personal wants, and get in return
the almost universal ‘Vara welcome,’ you do not feel in the slightest
degree that a good and likely man is being wasted and degraded just for
the promotion of your own comfort and convenience.

[Sidenote: _A Negro Masonic Funeral._]

On a Sunday while I was at Washington, I saw a grand negro funeral.
The deceased had been a minister in one of their churches, and also a
Freemason. He was therefore buried with Masonic honours. They chose
for the procession the streets in which, and the day and the hour of
the day when, there would be most people to witness it. The order was
as follows:—First came a negro on horseback to open the way; then a
powerful band. These were succeeded by two hundred Masons, all well
dressed, with aprons, scarves, and badges. After these the corpse in
a handsome coffin. In order that this might be completely seen, the
sides of the hearse were of plate-glass. The corpse was followed by
twenty carriages, each drawn by two horses. These carriages contained
the ladies of the _cortége_. I saw no attempt among them, by drawing
down blinds or the use of the handkerchief, to conceal their grief.
Their bearing, I rather thought, indicated the presence in their sable
breasts of the very ancient desire to see and be seen. No whites took
any part in the funeral. A great many, however, had assembled to
see it pass, all of whom appeared to behave very decorously. There
was evidently a great effort on the part of the blacks to appear
to advantage. It was a curious and interesting sight. Some of the
mulattoes were tall and good-looking, but far the greater part of them
were intensely ugly. In the procession was every shade of colour,
from ebony to what might have easily passed for the complexion of an
European; for in the United States not even light hair and blue eyes
with a fair skin can rescue from social exclusion the man who is known
to have in his veins a drop of negro blood.

Wherever in the South I mentioned this negro funeral, the same remark
was made on the Freemasonry of the negroes. Everyone professed himself
ignorant of how the negroes had come by it. No one knew who had
admitted them; and no one would acknowledge them as brother-Masons.

On going over the Smithsonian Museum, I was much struck by the
superiority of the birds of America to those of Europe in the
architectural skill and beauty of their nests.

While I was at Washington, a bill was before Congress for depriving of
the franchise every father whose children (up to a certain age) did not
attend school at least twelve weeks each year.

It was here that I first saw something of the Freedman’s Bureau.
Probably in the first days of emancipation some agency was needed for
regulating the movements of the negroes, and for supplying them with
information as to their newly acquired rights. I am, however, disposed
to think that so extensive a department as this bureau was altogether
a mistake. It has cost much, and, as far as I could judge, done some
harm and very little good. But of that anon: I will only speak now
of my visit to one of the coloured schools I found at Washington
under its superintendence. Like all the American schools I visited in
towns, it was graded; that is, as we should express it, the school
was divided into classes, each class having its own teacher and its
own school-room, and being in every particular entirely distinct and
separate from all the rest. There were about four hundred children on
the books, and the usual number, about fifty, in each grade. It is
impossible to exaggerate the advantages of this method of teaching.
Each teacher has but one class; therefore the whole of the school-time
is actually and actively employed in teaching. One class is not idle
while the teacher is attending to another. No child is neglected. All
parts of the school are equally cared for. There is much emulation
among the teachers, each desiring that his part in the general system
shall be done well. Each teacher having only one step or grade to
teach, perfects himself in it, and teaches it thoroughly. When it has
been completely mastered, the child is passed on to the teacher of the
next step or grade, who in his turn goes through the same process; till
at last the child, at the end of three years—for each grade requires
six months—leaves the school, having passed through all it professes to
teach, and generally having acquired it all thoroughly.

[Sidenote: _Coloured Schools._]

As I am not one of those who believe that the intellect of the longest
civilised and most highly cultivated race in the world is no better
than that of a race of which no branch has ever been civilised or
cultivated in any way or degree—or, to put it in other words, that
those who have given greater proofs of intelligence than any other race
of men are (which is a contradiction in terms) on a level with those
who have never given any proofs whatever of intelligence—I carefully
notice everything that appears in any way to militate against my side
of the question. For this reason I must mention that I was taken
by surprise at the quickness and attainments of these four hundred
coloured children. I never saw a school in England in which so much
readiness was shown in answering questions as to the meaning of words
that occurred in the reading lesson, and questions as to the meaning
of what had been read. I must, however, remark that this may perhaps
have been owing to the excellence of the teachers, who at present are
chiefly enthusiasts in the cause of the negro from New England, and to
this method of grading the schools. Of course the children were not
readier or better taught than white children are in America. And here,
besides, comes in the doubt whether the intellectual development of
this race, as all travellers in Africa assert, does not stop at the age
of fourteen. There was in connection with these schools one for adult
negro scholars, which may be regarded as to some extent a contradiction
of this opinion, for I will not call it fact.

A great many of our ideas about American manners are mere traditions
of an utterly gone-by state of things, as far away from their
present manners (for changes are rapidly effected in America) as our
own present manners are from those of Squire Western’s and Parson
Trulliber’s day. In travelling 8,000 miles, through all parts of the
Union, I never once saw, even in the woods of the South, or on the
prairies of the West, any more than in New York or Boston, a _table
d’hôte_ dinner, served, at the sound of a bell, at one time for all
the guests of the house, upon which a scramble ensued for every dish.
I should be surprised to hear that this practice now existed in a
single hotel in the Union. The method of proceeding, which is now
universal, is for every single person, or party of persons, to be
served separately. Nor are the middle-class Americans, who are the
chief frequenters of hotels, more rapid in despatching their meals than
we are. They are the reverse of talkative. They are not inquisitive.
They are far more civil and helpful to one another and to strangers
than Englishmen are. Those whom we should consider in good society are
in a very high degree quiet and unassuming. I never heard an American
use the word ‘Siree’ for Sir; nor did I ever hear one ‘guess’; nor
was I ever asked to ‘liquor.’ And so one might go on with many other
things which were once American practices, but have been utterly
abandoned. The fact is that the Americans are the most reasonable and
teachable people in the world. Prove to an Englishman that he is wrong,
and he will cling to his mistake more closely than before. Prove to the
Americans that they are wrong, and the whole people will, as if they
were one man, readily abandon their mistake.

[Sidenote: _Our Diplomacy with America._]

I left Washington by an early train. Trains, as is the case with the
hours for breakfast and for business, are earlier in the United States
than in England. On coming down to the bar of the hotel at 5 A.M., I
found that the night service of the hotel had spent their long watch in
listening to Mr. Dickens’s ‘Oliver Twist,’ each reading aloud in his
turn.

In our diplomatic intercourse with the Government of the United States
our method of proceeding ought to be founded on a right appreciation
of the character of the people, because it is mainly with the people
themselves that we have to do. Everybody reads the newspapers;
everybody has his opinion, and what is the opinion of the majority is
what is done. Now, speaking generally, the character of the people
of the United States is such that the simplest style of diplomacy,
or rather no diplomacy at all, is requisite in dealing with them.
The Americans are an eminently reasonable people, and can be made to
understand what is right. It is not as if we had to deal with Austrian,
or Russian, or French diplomatists, with whom, unless we have long been
much mistaken, reason and right are not the first considerations. What
is requisite, then, in dealing with our cousins on the other side of
the water, is, that we should ask for nothing but what we are clearly
entitled to—what is our due, and our own; and that having asked for no
more than what is rightfully ours, we should not concede one jot or
one tittle. In two words—right and firmness—are comprised all that we
have to attend to. It is absurd to suppose that we are incapable of
making them understand what is our right; and they will respect us if
we maintain our right with firmness, and they will despise us if we do
not. They would never go to war with us knowing themselves to be in the
wrong.

But, just as in trade they are always ready to take advantage of every
slip or oversight on the part of those with whom they deal, deeming
that men, whether themselves or others, must pay the penalty of
carelessness, or ignorance, or even of want of sagacity—carrying this
to a point beyond what we should consider quite justifiable—so also in
diplomacy they will see what can be made out of all kinds of claims and
demands such as their politicians are ever ingenious and forward in
suggesting. But they are too just and reasonable a people to persist in
being misled, after things have been fully and fairly put before them.
Having, then, right clearly on our side, all the art that is required
for the double purpose of maintaining our right, and of securing their
respect, is firmness.

[Sidenote: _Washington._]

In its public buildings Washington has begun to resemble an European
capital. Everyone has seen engravings of the Capitol. It is a
large marble building with a central dome, very well placed on an
eminence at one end of the city. From some reason arising out of
the proprietorship of the land, no private residences or shops have
sprung up in its immediate vicinity. The main street, of about a mile
in length, connects it with the Executive Mansion, as the President’s
house is called in newspaper language. This also is of white marble. It
is about as large as the country house of an English gentleman who is
in receipt of an income of 10,000_l._ a year. The ground sinks between
the Capitol and the President’s house. Most of the public offices
are in the immediate neighbourhood of the latter. The chief part of
the city lies around and beyond the President’s house. The Treasury,
which has been built since the war, is in its dimensions worthy of the
enormous business carried on in it—that is, the printing and issue of
the greenback currency. It also is of white stone, I believe a kind
of granite. The only other building worthy of notice, either from its
dimensions or uses, is the Patent Office. In this is contained a model,
or specimen, of everything for which a patent has been issued in the
United States. One ought at least to walk through the numerous and
spacious and well-filled apartments of this building, to get an idea
of the activity of the inventive faculty in America, and of the great
honour in which it is held.

I understood from Americans that every facility and security possible
are given to persons desirous of taking out patents. Not only is there
this museum to enable them to see whether or how the thing has been
done before, but there are also persons whose business it is to be
thoroughly acquainted with the specifications and objects of all former
patents, and who are ready to supply any information on the subject
to all applicants. I could not but contrast this instance of American
intelligence and wisdom with our English methods for discouraging
invention, notwithstanding the fact that mechanical inventions are
among the chief foundations and glories of our manufactures.

The Americans are a population of very thirsty souls. I do not know
whether the cause of this is the dryness of the climate, or the habits
of the people, or both combined. All day long, throughout the winter as
well as the other seasons of the year, people are drinking water with
ice floating in it. Many persons finish their breakfast with a large
tumbler of this. Wherever men congregate, whether in the drawing-rooms
of hotels or of private houses, or even in railway-cars, there is to
be found the ever-present and ever-needed iced water. I found myself
thirstier, and drank a great deal more in America than I had ever done
before; and, like the natives, I felt a repugnance to drink water,
however cold the weather might be, without ice in it. Now again in
England, I am satisfied with perhaps one fourth of the water I needed
in the United States, and I have no desire for the ice I regarded
almost as a necessary there.




CHAPTER VI.

 RICHMOND—WAY BY THE BATTLE-FIELDS—HANDINESS OF AMERICAN
 SOLDIERS—EFFECT OF SLAVERY ON THE VIRGINIAN LANDSCAPE—APPEARANCE
 OF AMERICAN FOREST—REPUBLICAN RELATIONS OF FATHER AND SON—STATE
 OF FEELING IN VIRGINIA—BILLIARDS IN AMERICA—WHY RICHMOND MILLERS
 UNDERSOLD BY CALIFORNIAN—WHY AMERICAN CITIES ARE LARGE—AMERICAN
 LIVING—PROSPECTS OF RICHMOND—INDICATIONS OF SOUTHERN CLIMATE IN
 RICHMOND—CHURCH MATTERS IN RICHMOND—INTEREST THAT ATTACHES TO RICHMOND
 AND TO THE HEROISM OF THE SOUTH.

[Sidenote: _To Richmond by the Battle-fields._]

In going to Richmond I made the circuit by Gordonsville, that I might
visit the battle-fields of the late war which lie so thickly on that
route from Washington. I went by Bull’s Run, Culpepper Court House,
Manassas Junction, the Rapahannock, the Rapidan, &c. This ground was
several times contested. Nothing strikes one now in these sites except
the extent of the breastworks and rifle-pits, and of the earthworks for
batteries. I was told by a general of engineers who went through the
whole war, that American soldiers, especially those in the Northern
armies, were always eager of themselves to throw up these defences. It
was their custom to set to work upon them even when tired with a long
day’s march or severe fighting; and there were occasions when they did
this without tools. They acted in this way because they had sufficient
intelligence to be fully aware of the advantage to themselves of
earthworks of this kind, and therefore were desirous of being provided
with them as speedily as possible. Most of the men, too, being young
farmers or sons of farmers, had been accustomed to felling timber, and
working on the land, so that every regiment was full of ready-made
pioneers.

Another advantage possessed in a preeminent degree by the Northern
armies, was that—their soldiers having been drawn from all classes and
trades—if a corps for wheelwrights’, millwrights’, harness-makers’, or
almost for any other kind of work required on the field, was suddenly
wanted, it was always to be had ready-made at a moment’s notice.

On passing over these battle-fields one quickly understands why in
the late war cavalry was so little used for improving a victory,
and why also the attacking army generally appeared to have so great
an advantage. In this part of Virginia—and I found it to be so
everywhere throughout the South—the clearings are small and few, and
far between, all the rest of the country being covered with forest,
or with abandoned clearings returning to forest. In such a country
cavalry could not have acted, even if, which was seldom the case, the
victorious army had had more than was required for outpost duty and
other work of the kind. And there being cover everywhere, an advancing
force, in coming up for an attack on the enemy, could everywhere find
concealment and shelter.

[Sidenote: _How Slavery Modified the Landscape._]

As soon as you enter Virginia you see unmistakable evidences of the
recent existence of slavery. The country is not cleared, cultivated,
and inhabited in the marvellous manner which so much surprises and
pleases one in the North, where each man holds a plot of about a
hundred acres, more or less, with his neat homestead planted in the
middle of it. Here only a very small proportion of the land is under
cultivation: far the greater part has, on the wasteful Southern system
(where men owned large estates of several thousand acres, many times as
much as they could keep in hand), been worked out, and then abandoned
and allowed to return to wood. A respectable house is hardly ever seen
along this line of railway. One gets tired of the monotony of the
forest, and of the ever-recurring reflection how differently things
would have looked, if this glorious State, blessed so highly in its
soil and climate, had not been cursed with the blight of slavery.

I was surprised to find how closely the American forests resemble
those of Europe. I suppose this settles the point that at some remote
epoch of geological time the two continents were united. The two
commonest species, and which often constitute the whole forest, are the
never-failing pine and the oak. They both reach from Canada to the Gulf
of Mexico. The former, to unscientific eyes, is only a small edition
of the Scotch fir; and the oak, in its several varieties, as you pass
along the railway, has much the same physiognomy as our English oak.
The same may be said of the elm, the ash, the birch, the maples and
the poplars. In the woods there is generally no undergrowth; on the
embankments and outskirts of the woods a rubus, very like some forms
of our English blackberry, is abundant. What is most striking in the
forests is the want of fine trees. Except in the Rocky Mountains, I
never saw one in the United States. Their oaks and pines die at the
top before they have got much beyond what we should call poles. They
never seem to branch freely. I suppose their progenitors having grown
in the forest for so many thousand years, the race has acquired the
habit of growing straight. In the heart, however, of the city of New
York, in Broadway between the Fifth Avenue Hotel and the Coleman House,
I noticed the trunk (for not much more is now left) of an occidental
plane that must once have been a noble specimen of its kind. I was told
that in Kentucky and Ohio there were fine trees, but I saw none. I have
heard from travelled Americans similar remarks to those I have just
been making on the dearth of large trees in the United States. This of
course is said of those States that lie to the east of the Alleghany
Mountains.

[Sidenote: _Republican Relations of Father and Son._]

We are in the habit of regarding Americans as less domestic than
ourselves. I would suggest that their ideas on this subject are
somewhat different from ours. It struck me that with them a little
republicanism had passed from the State into the home—that children
assumed and were allowed a greater degree of independence and equality
than with us. This doubtless arises in a great degree from the early
knowledge all children have that they will be able and must soon begin
to provide for themselves. But it is greatly promoted, I believe, by
the fact that the sons do not, as a general rule, leave the paternal
roof when they go to school. With us the father never sees his children
except in the holidays, and therefore continues to regard them as
children, and never learns to regard them as companions. In America
the father never loses sight of his child, who thus grows up as his
companion, and is soon treated as a companion, and as in some sort an
equal. I was often struck with this while listening to conversations
between fathers and sons. The father, evidently quite in good faith,
would ask the child’s opinion, and inquire of him what he was going to
do; as if he had some right to opinions of his own, and to independent
action in matters in which he was himself concerned. A little incident
in the train as I was on the way to Richmond, illustrated, I thought,
this state of things. A father and son of about fourteen years of
age were among the passengers, and in the next seat to myself. They
had long been talking on a footing of equality in the way I have
just mentioned; at last, to while away the time, they began to sing
together. First they accompanied each other. Then they took alternate
lines; at last alternate words. In this of course they tripped
frequently, each laughing at the other for his mistakes. There was
no attempt at keeping up the dignity of a parent, as might have been
considered necessary and proper with us. There was no reserve. They
were in a certain sense already on the equal footing of persons of the
same age.

I should have been glad to have fallen in again with this gentleman,
as, from the casual conversation I had with him this day in the railway
car, I found that he was one of the most cultivated persons I met in my
tour through the United States.

I arrived at the Spotswood Hotel at Richmond after dark, and was
immediately shown into the supper-room, and placed at a table already
occupied by three other persons. We soon entered into conversation.
They knew at the first glance, as I found everywhere was the case,
that I was an Englishman. ‘Sir,’ said the youngest of the party,
who did not appear to be yet twenty years old, ‘you have come to a
God-forsaken country. Those who lately had riches are now in want; and
the whites are now ruled by the blacks.’

Another gentleman I had met during the day had said to me, that ‘he
and many others wished they were living under a king of the English
royal family. That Virginians deeply regretted that they had ever
been separated from England; but that it was their own doing; for, if
they had not helped, the Yankees never could have brought about the
separation alone.’

Before I left Richmond, I had heard some of this gallant and most
unfortunate people give utterance to the sentiment, ‘that they were so
stung by the sense of defeat, that they were ever wishing themselves
dead. That everything had been so completely set on the cast of the
die, that now, when it had decided against them, they could not find
anything to live for. That their sense of honour had been crushed by
defeat. That their property had been taken from them. That their black
slaves had been made their masters.’

[Sidenote: _Billiards._]

I afterwards met with other Virginians, who, having been impoverished
by the war, had voluntarily expatriated themselves that they might,
if possible, find elsewhere some support for those who were dependent
on them. They were men who had been in the first and the last fight,
and had lost everything they possessed. But I never heard from their
lips one word of disloyalty to the Union to which they had returned
in perfect good faith. They had appealed to the arbitrament of the
sword. The decision had been against them; and they had submitted
without any reservation to that decision. Their bitterness was only for
those trading politicians who, being, as they thought, incapable of
understanding honourable men, had sent a Freedman’s Bureau and an army
of occupation to oppress and torment those who were now quite as loyal
to the Union as themselves, and if they were not, yet were utterly
incapable of moving a finger against it.

The rage for athletic exercises, which has spread like wildfire over
England, has made some feeble and unsuccessful efforts to lay hold of
the mind of Young America. It is quite in harmony with the English
love of field sports and outdoor games, but not at all with the habits
and predilections of Americans. Their climate, which covers the ground
with snow in winter, and is so hot in summer, may be unadapted to, and
therefore indispose them for these things. But I believe the chief
cause is in their indoor pursuits, which engross so much of their time
and thoughts, and in the almost total absence among them of a class
possessed of leisure, which from the times of the barons to the present
day has always been a large and constantly increasing class amongst us.
Billiards appear to have taken very much the place in America which
field sports and athletic exercises occupy here. The large billiard
rooms of their large hotels are of an evening always full of players
and spectators. The American tables have no pockets, except in the four
corners. At the hotel at which I stayed while at New York, I saw a man
who played his game without cue or mace, merely spinning his ball
between his thumb and middle finger. He had attained to such skill in
doing this, that he appeared to be able to send the ball just to any
point he pleased, with the greatest ease and certainty. I suppose, like
Blondin, he had made a single muscular feat the work of his life. I saw
billiard tables set up in wooden shanties on the plains of the North
Platte, and beyond the plains at the foot of the Rocky Mountains.

I inquired here about the truth of what I had heard at Washington,
that the great millers of Richmond had last year been undersold in the
market of New York by the millers of California; and I was assured by
one of the oldest and largest firms in the city that it was so. This
firm, who had so short a water carriage from their own mill to the
quays of New York, whose appliances of business were all perfected
before the fathers of those now their rivals in California were born,
who carry on business on such a scale as to make between seven and
eight thousand barrels of flour a-week, cannot sell a barrel of that
flour in New York at less than two dollars more than the price at
which the Californian sells it. They account for this in the following
way. At the time the Californian’s harvest is ripe, he knows for a
certainty that for two or three months no rain will fall. He therefore
merely cuts his wheat without putting it into stacks or barns, without
even gathering it up into sheaves. All this expense in harvesting he
is saved. When he has cut the whole of his crop, he takes his machine
into the field, and threshes it from the swarth. But this is not all.
He gains still more largely in another way. He ploughs his land for
wheat, and puts in his seed. The land is naturally so clean, and the
climate so favourable, that the dropped grains of the first harvest
will give him another crop next year, without a cent of cost, for there
will be no ploughing or seeding required. Thus every second crop is
a pure gift of nature. It is this that makes Californian wheat, and
therefore Californian flour, so cheap. I tell the tale as it was told
to me. I remember, however, that Sir Alexander Burns mentions that he
saw wheat in the neighbourhood of Bokhara which was a biennial, and
that the Bokhara farmer got two crops from one sowing. It is possible
he may have got two crops from one sowing, not because on the banks of
the Oxus the wheat plant was capable of bearing seed twice, but in this
Californian fashion.

[Sidenote: _Two Crops of Wheat from One Sowing._]

American cities are not in the position of our country towns, but of
the capitals of European kingdoms. Richmond, for instance, till the
disruption of Virginia which took place during the late war, was the
capital of a State as large as the whole of England and Wales, with
the addition of almost the half of Scotland. And as the sites of these
cities were always chosen on account of the facilities they offered
for trade and commerce, they have in almost every instance become
the emporia for the chief part of the foreign and domestic business
of their respective States. This also has generally led to their
becoming manufacturing towns. In this way each has come to engross
almost everything in the State that contributes to the building up
of a great city. Bearing this in mind, we shall cease to wonder at
the rapid growth in population, wealth, and trade of such a place as
Chicago. It is a measure of the population, the wealth, the production
and consumption of the great State of Illinois. Just so also with
Cincinnati, St. Louis, and all their other great cities. They are made
by the States to which they belong. This of course is not the case with
New York, which is the commercial capital of a great part of the Union,
or with New Orleans, which is the warehouse through which a large
proportion of the produce of the valley of the Mississippi must pass.
We must also remember that these large cities are at enormous distances
from each other. In some instances, as notably in those of New York and
New Orleans, the chief town in the State has not been able to retain
the presence of the State legislature; this loss, however, has proved
of no great consequence to them.

We are often told that the character of a nation in some degree depends
on its kitchen. A traveller therefore who understands all that will be
expected of him when he returns home, will not pass by unnoticed the
style of cookery, and the materials with which it deals, of the people
among whom he makes what I heard in this country called, not unaptly,
‘a tour of observation’; and cookery, whether he chooses to observe it
or not, is a matter which at all events is submitted to his observation
two or three times a day.

The fact that first struck me in American ‘living’ was its abundance.
Butchers’ shops and poulterers’ were, particularly the latter, of more
frequent occurrence and better stored than I had ever seen elsewhere.
Everybody appears to have plenty to eat, and few appear to neglect
their opportunities.

[Sidenote: _American Living._]

But as this is a prosaic subject, I must begin at the beginning. On
my voyage out, before I had had time to generalise a conclusion on
such a subject, a gentleman among the passengers confided to me, as
the result of his own experience, that New England young ladies (of
course he did not mean this of the young ladies who belonged to the
upper ten thousand) never appeared less amiable than when at breakfast.
A long and large experience enabled him to speak with some authority
on this subject; though, as I afterwards discovered, he was not a
quite unprejudiced commentator. I declined to accept his conclusion,
notwithstanding his pointing out to me two young ladies who seemed to
confirm it by disposing, each of them every morning, of a beefsteak,
while they were considering what they would order for breakfast, and
then going through a performance of varieties which was in very good
keeping with the prologue.

One ought to be sparing of comment on a neighbour’s way of managing
himself. You are not acquainted with his constitution, or with the
atmosphere he has to live in, or with the kind of work he has to do;
and these things may render advisable in his case what would not suit
yourself. But if you know that some of his habits are such as do not
generally conduce to a sound sanitary condition, and then see that
the doctor is the most frequent visitor in his house, you can hardly
help coupling the two facts together in the relation of cause and
effect. Now it happens that wherever one is in the United States,
the most prominent and abundant _affiches_ are those that recommend
different kinds of ‘bitters.’ There are ‘Red jacket bitters,’ and
‘Planters’ bitters,’ ‘French,’ ‘German,’ ‘Mexican,’ and ‘American
bitters,’ but no English, which I am disposed to take as a compliment
implying that Englishmen need no such restoratives, for it can hardly
mean that the name would be no recommendation. And there are bitters
from the four quarters of the compass, limiting the range, I suppose,
to American soil. All this of course implies that in our neighbour’s
case ‘perfect order does not reign in the interior;’ and it struck me
that his constant habit of beginning the day with a breakfast that
for its variety and solidity would be sufficient for a dinner on this
side, had something to do with it. I hazard this, though the reply
is obvious that one does not know what is requisite in this way in
America. It is possible too that these bitters may not always mean
what the traveller is likely to suppose. I say this because, on an
occasion when a fractured rail delayed the train on the banks of the
Mississippi for several hours, and every one produced what he had in
the way of resources for passing away the time, an American I was then
with produced from his hand-bag a bottle of what he called ‘Angostura
bitters.’ I was rather surprised at his offering me a glass of it,
thinking from its name that it must be something medicinal. I found it,
however, to be merely a better kind of whiskey a little fortified with
spice.

But though one may not be quite up to the mark in judging of the
significance of these numerous species of bitters, one at all events is
able to understand the constant complaints of Americans themselves on
the subject of their health. One never elsewhere met with people who so
frequently impart to you the information that they are suffering from
dyspepsia. They do things in America on a big scale, and here they have
a bigger amount of dyspepsia than any other country in the world. There
may be other causes for this, but I still, perhaps very ignorantly,
think the breakfast sufficient to account for it. It is a good rule in
dietetics, as in many other things, to begin the day quietly. A certain
amount of breakfast means a certain amount of work for the digestive
machinery; and just the same rule that would apply to your horse will
apply to this animal part of your own system. If you were going to
give him some work in the afternoon, and again in the evening, or at
night, you would spare him in the morning. One’s stomach cannot always
be working hard any more than one’s horse can. I heard of a Southern
planter who (before the war) never sat down to breakfast with less
than six-and-twenty farinaceous preparations before him. I forbear to
call them six-and-twenty kinds of bread, as my informant did, because
they included dough cakes, buckwheat cakes, slap-jacks, fried hominy,
&c. It was by no means meant that the gentleman who was so profuse in
furnishing ‘the bread-kind’ department of his breakfast table confined
himself to what he found there. These were merely the garniture, and
not the substantial part of the replenishment of his matutinal board.

I heard of another gentleman, who bore a name well known in the Union,
and who made it his daily practice to conclude this meal with a large
bowl of cream; and of a third who, when, in Homeric fashion and phrase,
he had appeased the rage of his appetite, would conclude with as many
buckwheat cakes as he could lift at one time on his fork, which it was
his custom to strike for this purpose through a lofty pile of them.
Americans, sooner or later, find breakfasts of this kind harder to
digest than they have hitherto found their national debt.

As buckwheat cakes are the usual finale of an American breakfast, I
will explain what they are, and how they are to be eaten. The cakes are
made from a batter (as the name implies) of buckwheat meal. They are
done on a griddle. Each is in diameter about the size of the palm of
one’s hand, and in thickness about the sixth of an inch. The usual way
of serving them at hotels is three cakes, one on the top of another,
to each person; not from any wish to limit the number consumed, but
because they cannot be eaten in perfection if more or less than three
are brought at one time. You then prepare them yourself, by lifting
the uppermost one with your fork, and buttering the upper surface of
the middle one (if they are not hot enough to melt the butter they are
worthless) you then reverse your pile of three, and lifting what had
been the bottom one, repeat the process of buttering. That completed,
you pour upon them from a jug, which is always brought with them,
enough maple-syrup, or that failing, enough clarified syrup of sugar
to cover them. They are now ready, and are by no means to be despised.
As the buckwheat, however, is a little oleaginous, the cakes are a
little leathery—so much the better, many will say; but this, and the
combination of butter and syrup, must, one would think, render them
somewhat dyspeptic. Still they are universally approved of, and it is
the waiter’s business at an hotel, when he sees you are finishing
your breakfast, to ask you ‘if you will have some cakes.’ There would
be something to say in favour of concluding a moderate breakfast
occasionally in this way, but to make the cakes a daily addition to a
varied and solid meal is to presume too much on one’s strength. Who
but would be appalled at contemplating the amount of work which half a
century of such breakfasts would impose upon himself?

[Sidenote: _Slap-jacks._]

Where buckwheat meal, as in the Western prairies, cannot always be
had, a good and orthodox substitute is the slap-jack, which is made
and served in precisely the same way, the only difference being that
of the material, which is wheaten flour. As this latter preparation
is capable, and I think worthy, of acclimatisation, I will mention
that the batter from which it is made has no other ingredients than
flour, water, and soda. The griddle must be rubbed with a piece of suet
before it is heated, and again before it is used. Serve in threes—very
hot—with butter and syrup, as with the buckwheat cakes. I picked up
this bit of culinary lore at a solitary ranche on the plains, where,
having exhausted all the more obvious resources of the place, there was
nothing else to do.

At the great hotels five meals a day are allowed. This is too much,
not for the hotels, for such liberality is attractive (of course they
all have a fixed price per day, ranging from three and a half to five
dollars, for bed and board), but it is too much for the guests who
avail themselves of it.

I need not go into particulars as to how the great American nation
dines. If a man has breakfasted as he ought, and spent the day as
he ought, he may dine as he pleases. No people in the world have a
greater variety of materials for dining well than they have; perhaps
no people so great a variety. Their beef and mutton are (thanks to our
climate) not quite up to the English mark, but they are better than any
on the continent of Europe. In variety, however, of materials they far
exceed us. In Ohio and Kentucky they have naturalised the pheasant.
The domestic turkey, as might be expected in the native region of its
race, is so abundant as to be almost within everybody’s reach. The
same may be said of all kinds of poultry. This results from the great
number and smallness of the farms in America, and from the abundance
of Indian corn. There is also no scarcity of prairie game and quail.
Wild venison is to be had everywhere, which, when properly kept and
cooked, as I have seen it at Southern tables, is as tender as chicken,
though entirely devoid of fat. I once saw terrapin soup and stewed
terrapin on the _menu_; and thinking that I should frequently see them
there again, I let that opportunity for qualifying myself to form some
opinion of their merits pass by, and no other opportunity occurred—I
suppose because it was not the season for it. I let pass in the same
way all opportunities at New York for making myself acquainted with the
merits of the buffalo, thinking that I should frequently meet with it
in the West. When at Denver I received an invitation to sup on buffalo,
which was the only chance I had in the West; and this invitation I was
unable to accept. Stewed clams and clam soup are not bad. Soft-shelled
crabs are not good. There is a very great variety of wild fowl: at
Mobile, and in a still greater degree at New Orleans, I was astonished
at the number of species I saw in the market. At the head of all these
stands the world-renowned canvas-back. No one, I believe, ever found
him inferior to his reputation: of all the feathered tribe he is the
tenderest and the most juicy. If he has come from the Potomac, he has
a fine flavour of the wild celery, which is there his chief food. The
red-head duck has the second place in point of excellence.

[Sidenote: _American Vivres._]

But what I put first on the list of all the good things of America is
its oyster. It is two or three times the size of the European bivalve;
I think more tender, and certainly of a more delicate flavour. It has
also the great merit of being entirely free from any trace of a coppery
taste, which habit and necessity only have brought us to tolerate in
our own mollusk. To all its other merits it adds this great one—that it
exists in incredible and inexhaustible quantities: and we know that it
was abundant in the remote epochs of the past; because on the coasts
of the Southern States we find long ridges of its shells, which must
have been the slow accumulations of the thousands of years during which
some savage race, that has left behind it in these mounds no record of
any capacity for improvement or progress, was in the habit of fishing
it from the contiguous beds, and leaving its shells on the nearest
beach. This race has passed away without having left any record of its
existence except these heaps of oyster shells. But the descendants
of the oysters they lived upon still exist, and their shells are
dispersed, by the aid of the locomotive, over the whole continent.
How interesting and suggestive a contrast is here! But to keep to our
subject: these oysters exist in such abundance that in the Gulf of
Mexico I saw them bailed into the boats as fast as the men who were
taking them could work their rakes. There are enough of them taken for
a large trade with the towns in the interior, to which they are sent
either fresh or in tins. Wherever you go you have them in some form or
other—scalloped, stewed, uncooked, or in soup—every day; at some places
you see them on the bills of fare for breakfast, dinner, and supper.
As on my return to England we were supplied with them throughout the
voyage, and as our own oysters have of late been selling at a famine
price, I do not see why we should not import a part of our supply from
America.

As far as I was able to judge from what I saw (my experience was
confined to the winter), I thought that in fish we had the advantage of
the Americans, both in variety and quality. Their white fish and bass
are good. The latter is best when broiled. I mention this as I am not
aware that we cook our bass in this way.

Maize enters largely into the dietary of Americans, and is used in a
hundred forms. Well-prepared hominy is a good substitute for rice as
a vegetable adjunct to roast meat or stews. It ought to be as white
as paper, but to prepare it in this way requires a tedious process,
for it must be soaked for a long time in a strong lye, to get rid of
its yellow skin. Maize bread is good only for a few minutes after it
is taken out of the oven. As soon as it ceases to be warm, moist, and
soft, it ceases to be eatable. The sweet potatoes of America are as
superior to those of Algeria and the south of Europe as Stilton cheese
is to that of Suffolk. The best are grown in the sandy soils of the
South. In South Carolina from two to five hundred bushels per acre are
harvested. Pigs will fatten on them, and men can live on pork and sweet
potatoes. But no dependence can be placed on this root, as in some
years, for reasons that have not been discovered, they will not keep.

To those who are desirous of introducing a little variety into their
Christmas dinner I would recommend an American practice of serving the
turkey with hot apple jam. I need hardly say this is a very different
thing from apple sauce. There may, however, be some difficulty in
getting the jam made, as I do not recollect having often seen it in
England. I would also recommend for that festive season an American
method of improving mince pies. On this side it is sometimes objected
to this time-honoured institution, that there is a ha’p’orth of
mincemeat to an intolerable quantity of crust: with their unfailing
readiness of invention they have hit on the method of uniting what with
us would be two or three dozen small pies, almost all crust, into one
large raised pie, which they help in pieces or slices. This completely
meets the objection.

The fire which the Confederates kindled in Richmond to destroy the
tobacco that was in the city at the time the Northern army were about
to enter spread rapidly, as there was a strong wind at the time,
and destroyed the whole of the lower part of the town. This was the
quarter that was chiefly occupied by the large flour-mills and other
manufactories of the place; it contained also many of the largest
stores. A great part of what was burnt has been rebuilt, chiefly, I
understood, by Northern capital. At the time, however, of my visit the
work of reconstruction was at a standstill; and I saw considerable
spaces occupied only with the _débris_ of former buildings. One
might have expected that factories would not be rebuilt just yet, as
trade has been dull everywhere since the war, and as the Virginians
themselves, like all the Southern people, are utterly ruined. But that
any part of Richmond will ever remain in ruins it is difficult to
believe, for one cannot imagine a city more advantageously situated.
Nature has made it the commercial centre of a State which in climate,
soil, and abundance of water communication is unrivalled in the Union.
It may be regarded as the inland point upon which a great extent of
natural navigation converges. In the rapids of the James River it
possesses within the city great manufacturing power. In tobacco also
it has an agricultural product for export which is already enormous,
and which, as all the world wants it, may be increased to a practically
unlimited extent. Nothing, I think, is needed for enabling it to go
ahead as fast as any Western city but just a little time for arranging
matters in the town and in the neighbouring country on the new basis,
and so launching it on a career of prosperity which nothing henceforth
will be likely to check. As far as I am able to judge, the two best
speculations in the United States are buying land in Virginia (where it
may now be had in abundance at two or three shillings an acre—land that
must soon be settled in the Northern fashion) and in California, which
will be flooded with immigrants as soon as the Pacific Railroad is
opened through, and this is advertised for next year.

[Sidenote: _Prospects of Richmond._]

The upper part of Richmond is occupied with private residences. I was
at first surprised at their number, and at the indications they gave
of what had been till lately the wealth of their inhabitants. But this
surprise ceases when one remembers that it is the capital of, and the
only great city in, a rich and large State. Like most American cities
it has rows of trees in the streets, and here it is that you first
begin to see in the live oaks and magnolias unmistakable indications of
the commencement of a Southern climate. Some of the magnolias in the
little plots of ground in the fronts of the houses were true specimen
plants. I was never tired of looking at them. They had grown with such
uninterrupted regularity that there was not a twig, I might say not a
leaf, missing in them, to mar the symmetry of their form, which was
that of a large cone of the deepest green. Each leaf in size and depth
of colour was a noble object in itself. I thought, what would not one
give to see these noble trees in flower, and if a man could only have
such a tree on his own lawn in England?

Here, as I did wherever I went, I inquired into the position the
different churches, and especially the Episcopal Church, occupied in
the place; and here, as everywhere else, the Methodists and Baptists
appeared to be in the majority. I was taken to hear a very celebrated
Presbyterian preacher. As far as I could judge from a single sermon, I
thought that the preacher’s excellence consisted entirely in his style,
which was more polished and highly wrought than usual. As to his
matter, there was not an idea or a sentiment but what one might have
heard in the humblest chapel at home.

Of course sermons of this kind indicate the theological calibre of the
congregation as well as that of the minister; for ministers and sermons
are in the long run made by the congregation. In the evening of the
same day I attended service at an Episcopal church. The interior of the
building was profusely decorated with Christmas evergreens, and the
sermon showed that the preacher was a man of learning and thought.

There are five Episcopal churches in this city. Those who minister in
them appear to be well paid. I was told that the two highest salaries
were 4,000 and 3,500 dollars. I heard, however, but I do not know to
what denominations my informants belonged, and so possibly they may not
have been well acquainted with the subject, that the Episcopal Church
here is not so active as it is in the North. Of course in the North
there is greater intellectual and religious activity, just as there is
more doing in agriculture, manufactures, and trade; but if there was to
be any exception to this rule, I should have expected to have found it
in the Episcopal Church in Richmond, because here the people in hearing
and conversation far more closely resemble Englishmen than is the case
in the North. They speak, too, more frequently, and with more regard,
of the old country, its people, and its institutions. Everybody I saw
in the churches in Richmond, just as in the churches of the Northern
cities, was well-dressed. The humbler classes appeared neither to have
churches for themselves nor places in the churches of the rich. This,
as everybody knows, is the weak point in the American voluntary system
in their great cities.

[Sidenote: _Heroism and Sufferings of the South._]

Richmond possesses just now an especial interest for the traveller,
which attaches to no other city in the United States. It is the city
against which the North launched so many mighty hosts, and which was
defended with such bravery, skill, and success by Lee, Jackson, Stuart,
and other good soldiers whose names will live in history. It was in the
streets and houses of this city that the civil and military leaders
of the unfortunate Confederacy might have been seen. Here it was that
those resolutions were debated and formed which enabled them with such
slender resources in materials and men to stand at bay so long against
the overwhelming myriads of the North.

In talking, too, with Southern men about the war—the soldiers of the
North will understand, and even sympathise with the feeling—you are
more deeply stirred than in talking with Northern men. Those who
throughout wished the North well, and rejoiced in the issue of the
struggle, must still feel in this way. These Southern men fought for a
greater stake, for a country and for their property, against fearful
odds, and at great disadvantages. The issue was to them that they lost
everything except their honour. When you talk to these brave men,
and hear of the cruel privations and hardships they went through, of
their personal sufferings, of the brothers and sons they lost; when
you see them writhing under defeat, and paying heavier penalties than
vanquished men have ever paid in modern times, you regard them with
mingled feelings of admiration and pity, which cannot be awakened by
anything you can hear from those whose warfare has been crowned at
every point with complete success.




CHAPTER VII.

HOW SOUTHERNERS DESCRIBE THEIR OWN CONDITION—EACH STATE MUST BE TAKEN
SEPARATELY—MISSOURI—TENNESSEE—KENTUCKY—TEXAS—VIRGINIA—GEORGIA—FLORIDA—
NORTH CAROLINA—ARKANSAS—SOUTH CAROLINA—LOUISIANA—MISSISSIPPI—WILL THE
BLACKS GET THE FRANCHISE?—NO PARTY CONSIDERS THEM FIT—THEY WILL HAVE
IT FOR A TIME—THIS WILL WEAKEN THE REPUDIATING PARTY—ALSO THE PARTY
HOSTILE TO THIS COUNTRY—THE BLACKS WILL NOT ALL BE REPUBLICAN—THE SOUTH
SHOULD HAVE BEEN LEFT ALONE TO SETTLE THE LABOUR QUESTION—THE BUREAU
SUGGESTED FALSE IDEAS—THERE WILL BE NO WAR OF RACES—WHAT WILL KILL
OUT THE BLACKS—THE RATE OF THIS—FUSION PHYSICALLY IMPOSSIBLE—MEANS OF
COMMUNICATION IN THE SOUTH INDICATE ITS CONDITION.

I have been frequently asked what I found was the condition of the
South? And the question has been put in such a manner as to imply that
the speaker regarded the South as a homogeneous entity, and that he
supposed that the causes of its suffering—the war and the abolition
of slavery—affected every part of it equally. But the reverse of this
would be nearer to the truth. The Southern Confederacy was composed
of States very differently circumstanced from each other, except in
the one point of their system of labour; and the late war, and the
overthrow of their system of labour, have affected those different
States very differently. It is difficult to understand to how great a
degree this is the case without having oneself gone through the South
and seen these differences with one’s own eyes. This is what I did,
and I shall now attempt to give a short account of what I saw and
heard. My route was through Richmond, Petersburg, Weldon, Wilmington,
Charleston, Atlanta, Augusta, and Mobile to New Orleans; then up the
valley of the Mississippi by way of Jackson, Memphis, and St. Louis. I
had a superabundance of introductions for all the places I visited. I
had obtained at Washington letters to all the Generals holding commands
in the South, and which were in many cases fortified by duplicates
from other quarters. I had also brought with me letters from New York
and elsewhere to merchants whose firms ranked among the leading houses
of the South, and to others who had been through the war; to men who
were endeavouring to resuscitate the industry of their fallen States,
and to a gentleman who held one of the highest offices in the late
Confederate Government. I had therefore sufficient means for obtaining
the information I required.

[Sidenote: _The Condition of the South._]

But the question is, what did one see and hear, and what were the
conclusions to which one was brought by personal observation? The
fact that first forces itself on the eye in the towns, and often in
the rural districts you pass through, is that there are multitudes of
negroes loafing about, doing nothing. You see them at every station.
When you come to make inquiries as to what they are doing, and how
they subsist, and generally as to the state of the country, you are
told that they are to be found in shoals in every town where there
is a Freedman’s Bureau. They expect something from the Bureau; and,
like so many coloured Micawbers, are drawn to the towns in the hope
that something or other will turn up. So in the towns; but that in the
country districts, where there is no power to restrain the idle and
ill-disposed, things are in an actively bad condition—that this class
has taken to stealing, and has not left on many properties a sweet
potato or head of maize, or the pig that would have fed upon them—that
they have made a clean sweep of everything edible. As to the state of
the whites, that their condition is far more dreadful both to bear
and to contemplate; for the blacks, as soon as they please to do the
work they are accustomed to, may escape from their present distress,
but that tens of thousands of white families, who lately were living
in affluence and refinement, not knowing what it was either to want
anything or to do anything for themselves, are now in a state of abject
penury, positively of starvation; that many are without the means of
procuring hominy and salt pork, the humblest fare in the country. And
about this point there can be no doubt; for you have as evidence of the
statement not only what Southerners say, but, as I afterwards found
on returning to New York, the corroborative evidence of those good
Northern people who are themselves subscribing largely to keep these
destitute Southern families alive. In addition to all this, everyone
tells you that he expects the unspeakable horrors of a war of races,
which in their opinion cannot be adjourned for more than two years,
as the coloured population are becoming day by day more and more
dissatisfied with what the great change has hitherto done for them.

The first observation to be made on these statements is, that they
cannot be equally applicable to all the very differently circumstanced
States of the late Southern Confederacy. For instance, the State of
Missouri, which is one of the most fertile in the Union, and by its
climate thoroughly adapted to the Northern farm-system, was instantly
benefited by the abolition of slavery. Tennessee and Kentucky will soon
be in the same position, for both may very well be cultivated by white
labour. The slow rate of progress made by the latter, when compared
with the State of Ohio, which is only separated from it by the Ohio
river, and has a colder climate, and not a more productive soil, is a
proof that slavery, in which alone they differed, was the sole cause of
its retardation. Texas was even at the moment very slightly affected
by the change, and will now become a more attractive field than ever
for white immigration. Here cattle-breeding is the chief occupation,
which is one that does not at all require slave labour; and here also
cotton has for many years been cultivated by the whites without the
compulsory aid of the blacks. Virginia having passed through all the
distress which is implied by the passage from the estate to the farm
system, will emerge from its present distress a far richer and more
populous state than it was before. General Lee’s son, and many others
of the noble Virginian race, have already set the example, and are
themselves holding the plough and doing all the work of the farm with
their own hands. How much more pleasing a picture will the valleys
and plains of the Old Dominion then present when every hundred acres
shall have its homestead, and support a family of the noblest race of
mankind! And in truth how sad a picture have they hitherto presented,
while held in large estates, rudely cultivated by the enforced toil of
that race which was the lowest and most incapable of all! The northern
part of this State is very fertile, and is everywhere intersected with
navigable streams, such as would enable the farmer to ship his produce
generally from his own door. This is what is called the tide-way
district of Virginia. And as all vegetables and fruit grown here, in
the natural home of the magnolia, are at least a fortnight earlier than
they are to the north of the Potomac, they would command the markets of
New York and of the Northern cities. This advantage cannot be snatched
from them by any more southern State, as it is the combined result of
the character of their soil, of their climate, and of their abundant
means of water communication.

[Sidenote: _Position of each State._]

In Georgia, particularly in the upper part of the State, where the
ground rises considerably, I heard and saw that successful efforts were
being made to effect the change from the estate to the farm system;
and, instead of trusting entirely to cotton, to try what could be
done by growing wheat and maize, the latter to be turned into pork—in
short, to do whatever could be done to adapt their industry to existing
circumstances. Florida at present is rather occupied by wild deer than
by man; but as it is capable of becoming the chief winter _sanitarium_
for the consumption-scourged North, and also of producing tropical
fruits and sugar for the whole Union, it has a fair prospect before
it. Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, the writer of ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin,’
and sister of the celebrated Brooklyn preacher, has gone to Florida,
with her brother, Mr. Charles Beecher, for the purpose of attempting
the cultivation of the sugar cane with free labour. North Carolina
is endeavouring to follow the example of its neighbours Virginia and
Georgia. Arkansas, which was settled chiefly by the sons of Georgian
planters, is showing much of the Georgian spirit. In Alabama great
efforts had been made to re-establish the cultivation of cotton on the
basis of freedom; and things were promising well, when at the end of
1867 the price of cotton, by a concurrence of adverse accidents, fell
to 15 cents or 7½2_d._ at Liverpool. This depression to a point below
the cost of production in any part of the world was felt, I believe,
by most of those who attend to these matters, to be only a temporary
mishap. The same cotton was selling at the end of the following March
at 25 cents—a fully remunerative price; but in most cases the planters
had not been able to hold, so that the low price they were obliged to
accept has ruined many, and discouraged more. I was told by a Tennessee
cotton planter that a price of 20 cents would have contained an ample
margin for profit on the cotton he had himself grown, on a large scale,
with hired black labour. His contract with those he employed was
that he should give them high wages, with more than a proportionate
deduction for every hour of absence from work.

[Sidenote: _Distress in South Carolina._]

There now remain unmentioned only the three States of South Carolina,
Louisiana, and Mississippi. As far as I could judge, South Carolina
was utterly and hopelessly crushed. Its best estates were in the Sea
Islands, which, as they were very fertile, and their produce fetched
exceptionally high prices, were densely inhabited with blacks; in many
of them, however, no white man could live, or even pass a night with
impunity. Under these circumstances it might have been expected that
as soon as the negroes were emancipated they would take possession of
the land in these islands. And so it happened in most of the unhealthy
ones; while in those that were healthy the original proprietors equally
lost their property by confiscation or forfeiture, or by being ousted
in some way or other. The result of this, and of the other losses that
arose out of the war, and the utter overthrow of the Confederacy,
is that throughout South Carolina the most abject and irrecoverable
poverty reigns precisely where formerly there was most abundant wealth.
I heard of one gentleman, who before the war had been unable to spend
the whole of his large income, being now a porter in a dry goods store;
and of another, who formerly had possessed everything which riches
could supply, dying in such penury that his family had to beg of their
friends contributions for his funeral. For this State there appears to
be no resurrection, except in some new order of things, under which
a new set of proprietors will occupy the land, and cultivate it with
Northern capital, and somewhat in the Northern fashion.

In Louisiana also things were so bad that it was hardly possible to see
how they could be worse. In New Orleans I found families who formerly
had lived in noble mansions, and exercised a grand hospitality, now
occupying quiet lodgings. In some instances I knew of several families
clubbing together, and living as it were in common. But here there
was a great difference—hope was not dead. They talked confidently of
the re-establishment, at all events, of their sugar industry, and of
the trade of the city. I saw several sugar estates not far from New
Orleans, the very costly machinery upon which had been destroyed during
the war. I was told—though, of course, I cannot vouch for the accuracy
of the figures—that the machinery had been broken up and burnt on
twelve hundred out of the seventeen hundred sugar estates of this State.

As far as I could see and hear, the State of Mississippi also was in a
very bad way. This seemed to arise from two causes. A larger proportion
of the white inhabitants than is the case elsewhere belong to the class
called in the South ‘mean whites,’—that is, persons without property,
education, or enterprise. And then the planters are unable to borrow
what is requisite for enabling them to work their plantations. No one
will lend them a cent. This is but a natural consequence of the act
of repudiation they adopted at the instigation of Mr. J. Davis, late
President of the Southern Confederacy, and whom this State has either
the honour or the dishonour of reckoning among her best known men.

This, however, is not the only light in which the South has to be
regarded. There is the question of political as well as of industrial
reconstruction, and the former is now throughout all the North shaking
the very foundations of the Union, and setting the son against the
father, and the brother against the brother. The question is being
dealt with entirely and exclusively on party considerations, and
this Mr. Thaddeus Stevens and other leaders of the Republican party
have acknowledged in speech and print. They say universal suffrage,
whatever the consequences to the Southern planter, must be conceded to
the blacks, in order that the South may return to the Union, not as
of old, on the Democratic side, but on the Republican, as the present
exigencies of that party and of the Union require. Nothing can secure
this except the black vote. All considerations of the fitness of the
late slave for the exercise of the franchise is thus dismissed, and
nothing insisted on but what is needed by the necessities of the
dominant party.

[Sidenote: _The Negro Franchise._]

Of course no man who knows anything of the capacity and of the history
of the black race, even if he be of the Republican party, abstractedly
thinks that they are qualified for taking part in the government of
the country, and of legislating for and governing many of the Southern
States.

Will it then be conferred upon them? It may be taken for granted that
it will. Many talk of a secret compact—an underground railway, as it
is called on the other side—between the President and the Southern
leaders, to defeat by their joint efforts the Congressional plan, he
being rewarded by the support of the South, when, as Democratic States,
it returns to Congress. If such a compact has any existence, it is very
unlikely to have any results. As the blacks have been admitted to the
conventions throughout the South, for forming the new constitutions
under which they are to exercise the franchise, and as the present
Congress is determined that they shall have it, one does not see what
is to prevent its extension to them. Whether the possession of the
boon will be continued to them is another point. But be that as it may,
we must, I think, regard the immediate possession of the franchise by
the blacks as a certain event, and consider what are likely to be its
consequences.

Its first and most obvious effect will be that which it was intended to
produce—the weakening, and perhaps the exclusion from power for some
time, of the Democratic party. Will this be an evil or an advantage to
the Union? As far as I am able to judge, an unqualified advantage. The
Democratic candidate of to-day for the Presidency, Mr. Pendleton of
Ohio, and so of course the Democratic party itself are in favour of a
partial, but very considerable, repudiation of the debt. This would be
so disastrous a policy, that no one who wishes well to the Union can
wish well to the Democrats. But this plank in their platform may be
reshaped or entirely removed. Their permanent distinguishing principle
is resistance to the policy of strengthening the central Government at
the expense of the liberties and privileges of the separate States,
whereas the reverse of this is the distinguishing principle of the
great Republican party. It is evident that the Republican policy is
that which is best adapted for commanding and calling out for immediate
use the resources of the nation, and so during their great war it
was decidedly in the ascendent. And since the war, the tendency of
legislation and of administration has been in that direction: and this
tendency will probably become stronger, at all events it will be more
needed, as the United States increase in area and population.

[Sidenote: _Who are necessarily Hostile to England._]

Englishmen also may be reminded that almost all the abuse and insults
Americans have heaped upon us have been the manufacture of Democratic
brains, and, till Fenianism arose, came chiefly from Southern men. We
cannot wish success to that party from which we have never received
fair and courteous—I would even say, rational—treatment, and which now
encloses in its bosom all our deadliest enemies in the United States.
If formerly we regarded the accusations they brought against us, and
the motives they imputed to us, as the hallucinations of disordered
minds, we must now expect still livelier sallies, in order that they
may not fall below the mark of Fenian animosity. In any difficulty
which may arise between this country and the United States, the
Democratic leaders are precluded, for the sake of the Irish vote,
from recognising right or reason; and they must go on in this groove.
The Republicans are under no such demoralising necessity. Of course
it would be unwise in a traveller or a diplomatist to show decided
preferences for any particular party; but it is well to know where you
are likely to find friends. The manufacturing and commercial element
of the Republican party is alone disposed by circumstances to feel
ill-will towards us. But all this will die out as soon as the good
sense of the American people has made the discovery of the degree to
which they are crippled and impoverished by the pestilent heresy of
protection.

But to go back to the subject of the black vote. It does not appear to
me that this will always be given on the Republican side. The African
will be too ignorant to judge for himself; and though he will never
want for Northern advisers, he will have others nearer home, and in
some cases will, I think, be influenced by those who employ him; and
not unfrequently he may even wish, as the negro is the most imitative
of all the races of mankind, to vote, not as his sable brethren, but
as his old master votes. The whites will act as one man; the negroes
will never be able to do so; and in States where the colours are pretty
evenly balanced, a few deserters would incline the scale in favour of
the old Southern party.

I mentioned that while in the office of the Freedmen’s Bureau at
Washington, before I entered the South, it struck me that its
establishment could not be justified on grounds of wisdom. What I saw
in the South confirmed this supposition. Mischief, I thought, had been
done by it. The whites might safely, and ought in good policy to, have
been left to settle the labour question with their old slaves. They
quite understood that it would be ruin to themselves if they failed
to satisfy them, and that they could only do this by making them feel
that they were fairly and kindly treated. The future of the whites
entirely depended on this; and they saw the necessity of it so clearly
that they might, without any interference on the part of the North,
which could do no good, have been left to arrange with the blacks how
the new system was to be worked. These were the two parties to the new
labour-and-wages contract; and the Freedmen’s Bureau could have no
voice in the matter.

[Sidenote: _Impolicy of the Freedmen’s Bureau._]

The industrial question evidently came first, because it is on labour
primarily that the existence of a nation depends. But the Bureau
establishes itself in some town; and what does this mean? That the
blacks need protection—of course from their old masters, for there
are no other people on whom to cast this imputation. And what does
the Bureau itself give out that it will do? It proposes to educate
the negro. This implies that the first thing to be attended to is not
labour, but something else, and that a matter which in the order of
nature occupies only a secondary place. It implies too that during the
time education is being carried on, labour must be suspended, for one
cannot be in the school and in the field at the same time. And what is
the use and value of education in the eyes of the negro? Just this—that
it will fit him for the situation of a clerk, or for keeping a shop.
At all events it is no preparation for field labour. In these ways it
appears that the Bureau implanted, at a most critical time, false and
mischievous ideas which will inflict much suffering both on blacks and
whites, and which it will be very difficult to counteract. There would
have been no reason why the Government should not have sent, without
any flourish of trumpets, a commissioner into each State of the South,
to see that the blacks were fairly treated, if the whites had anywhere
shown a disposition to treat them otherwise.

As I have already intimated, I frequently heard Southern people
expressing an apprehension that a war of races was imminent. Their
reasons were that the disappointment felt by the blacks at the
smallness of their gains from emancipation was constantly deepening,
and that their posture towards the whites was becoming very
unsatisfactory. It is impossible, of course, to foresee what ignorant
and excitable Africans may do. Still I think a war of races a most
improbable event. The blacks have sense enough to know that there would
be no chance of their coming victorious out of such a conflict; for
they would be outnumbered by the whites, if all the Southern States
are regarded as a single unit, which they most assuredly would be for
the purposes of such a war; and they would be comparatively unarmed,
without resources, and without organisation. They also know that, even
if they were able to exterminate all the whites in the South, they
would gain nothing by this; for that then they would only be putting
themselves in the position of the Indian races, to be ousted from the
land whenever it suited the convenience of the North. And they are well
aware that in any rising they might contemplate they could expect no
help from the Northern force that was sent at the end of the war into
each State of the South to coerce the whites and protect the blacks.
The feelings of these men, I believe, are well known; at all events,
I heard one of them in a railway car in the South give expression to
his own feelings on this point, and he did it so as to include his
comrades. ‘They have sent us down here,’ his words were, ‘to look
after the whites and take care of the blacks. But that is not what we
are going to do. We are not going to help niggers to cut white men’s
throats. If they move a finger against the whites, we are not going
to mind colonels or generals, but will shoot every d—d nigger in the
place.’ Nor is it possible to conceive the existence of any other
feeling; for in no class in the United States is the antipathy to the
negro race so strong as in that from which the army is recruited. This
the negro knows very well.

[Sidenote: _The Blacks must Die Out._]

But though I think that no war of this kind is to be dreaded, which
would make very short work of the blacks, yet one cannot but think
that their eventual extermination by moral and economical causes is
inevitable. They have from the dawn of history been the chief export
of Africa, but have never anywhere been capable of existing in a state
of freedom on the same ground as any superior race. The superior race
gets possession of all the means of living, all the trades, all the
professions, all the land, and the inferior race is thus pushed out
of existence. If Congress were to enact, and future Congresses to
maintain the enactment, that south of the Ohio and Potomac no white
man was ever to do any kind of field labour, or to follow the trades
of carpentering or bricklaying, of shoemaking or tailoring, then there
would be means provided for the subsistence of the black race, and
it might possibly be kept up even in a state of freedom; but as none
of these occupations will eventually be left them, their doom is as
certain as anything can be in the affairs of men. Already, if a builder
introduces into his yard, or places on any work in which he is engaged,
a single coloured carpenter or mason, every person in his employ will
strike work unless the man of colour, however unexceptionable he may
be in his conduct, and however skilful in his trade, is instantly
dismissed. All the stevedores at New Orleans were a few years ago of
the coloured race. Some whites having taken to the employment, began to
insist on the dismissal of all coloured people; and now there is not
to be seen a single coloured stevedore on the quays of New Orleans.
And just so eventually it must be with field labour. The South must
be completely, or at the least largely, cultivated on the Northern
farm-system: and then it will be seen that the whites will no more
tolerate the companionship of the blacks in field labour than in
anything else. A people who have not the means of living must die out,
and so emancipation comes to be extinction.

Those who believe in the obliteration of the black race will speculate
on the time required for such a consummation. Suppose then each
generation is only able to leave behind it half its own numbers, this
would bring the blacks to the vanishing point at about the end of a
century, by which time the white population of the United States will
probably outnumber that of the whole of Europe. The rate of decrease,
however, may be much more rapid. Persons now living can recollect the
time when a considerable quarter of the city of Boston was occupied by
these people; but now, without emigration, they have almost entirely
disappeared. This is attributed by the people of Boston to several
causes. In a state of freedom they bring up very few children. The
mortality also among them is very great, especially from consumption;
and then there is the fact that in the second, or at latest the third
generation, the mixed race becomes quite incapable of continuing
itself. These facts are distressing to contemplate; but nothing is
gained by refusing to look facts in the face, of whatever character
they may be. It is an analogous fact that the red man has been swept
away from the face of the continent that was his own, all the way
from Boston to the Rocky Mountains; and the work of annihilation will
soon be complete from the Atlantic to the Pacific. But this ordinance
of nature, that a civilised and a savage race cannot coexist on the
same soil, is no reason why the inferior race should be treated with
unfairness, unkindness, or contempt.

[Sidenote: _Fusion of Races Impossible._]

As to the fusion of the two races, history assures us that nothing
of the kind has ever been accomplished, and that it is physically
impossible. And it is fortunate for the progress of mankind that nature
has put her veto upon it; otherwise that portion of the highest, and
most advanced, and most richly endowed race of the human family, which
has been placed on the grandest and most favourable stage for fresh
development, would be sunk and degraded by admixture with the lowest
race of all. The fact that in the long centuries during which the
Greeks and the Romans occupied Western Asia and Northern Africa, they
were unable to produce a mixed race capable of maintaining itself, may
be suggested for the consideration of those who are advocating a scheme
of ‘miscegenation’ between the Anglo-Saxon and the negro.

If we form our estimate of the condition of the South from considering
the condition of its means of communication, we shall find it bad
indeed. While I was there, some of its main lines of railway were
running only one passenger train a-day. And, notwithstanding the
infrequency of the trains, I observed in all the districts I passed
through that there were very few passengers, and very little traffic.
What ruin and desolation may be read in this single fact, when one
remembers that a few years back the value of the raw produce exported
from the Southern States amounted to between fifty and sixty million
pounds a-year, and was greater than anything else of the kind in the
world. What a vast amount of travelling must such a vast amount of
business have given rise to! for not only was fifty or sixty million
pounds’ worth of cotton, rice, sugar, turpentine, and tobacco to be
sent out of the country, but there was also an equal value in food and
manufactured goods to be brought in; for in the South they hardly grew
or manufactured anything, except what they exported. Everything they
consumed was imported. One cannot but contrast the stirring life which
all this must have caused in every town, harbour, and railway, with
their present deadness. The rails from Petersburg to Weldon are very
much out of order, but one despairs of being able to convey in words
an adequate idea of the state of disorder in which they are between
the latter town and Wilmington. It was over this line, of 162 miles in
length, that, during the war, the blockade-run goods and munitions of
war were forwarded to Richmond and the front. At that time there were
but small means for repairing or replacing worn-out rails. And as the
trade of Wilmington is now dwindled to nothing, and this road is off
the main line of communication with the South, there have as yet been
no inducements or funds to set it right. The jolting on it is so great
that the passengers are incessantly being thrown to a height of several
inches from their seat; and that at last produces in some the effect
which a gale at sea would have upon them. I believe that no English
railway carriage with only four, or at most six wheels, could keep
on such rails; but American carriages, having never less than eight
wheels, have a much firmer hold.




CHAPTER VIII.

 FIRST SIGHT OF A COTTON FIELD—SPANISH MOSS—A NIGHT ON THE RAILS—MANY
 KINDS OF SAMENESS IN AMERICA—MAIZE—ORDER OF SUCCESSION IN THE
 FOREST—ITS EXTENT—EVERGREENS IN THE SOUTHERN FOREST—POOR LAND IN THE
 SOUTH MAY BE MORE PROFITABLE THAN RICH LAND IN THE WEST—DEADNESS
 OF CHARLESTON—ITS HOTELS—A CHARLESTON SAM-WELLER—THE NAPLES OF
 THE UNITED STATES—FEW ENGLISH TRAVELLERS—SUFFERINGS OF SOUTHERN
 FAMILIES—WANT OF SCHOOLS—HOW THE DEFICIENCY IS BEING SUPPLIED—BLACKS
 SHOULD BE PUT ON SAME FOOTING AS WHITES—DIALOGUE WITH BLACK MEMBER OF
 CONVENTION—ANOTHER CONVENTION—ABLE BLACK MEMBER—SOUTH CAROLINA ORPHAN
 ASYLUM.


[Sidenote: _First Sight of a Cotton Field._]

One cannot behold for the first time what one has heard and read about
all one’s life without some little emotion. I felt this when I saw for
the first time a field of cotton. It was between Petersburg and Weldon.
There is not much to attract attention in the sight itself as seen
in winter, when there is nothing to look at but a large enclosure of
dead bushes, each about the size of an ordinary gooseberry-bush, only
with fewer branches, and every branch leafless, straight, and black,
with every here and there a pod of cotton, that was missed at the time
of harvesting, showing its white wool, with which the whole field
is spotted, ‘This insignificant plant, then,’ I said to myself, ‘is
cotton; and this is the way in which it is cultivated. The plant which
has created so much wealth, and caused so much bloodshed; which was
the main support of slavery, and so the main cause of the late war;
which clothes so large a portion of mankind; which has built so many
ships and factories; upon which so much of the prosperity of England is
founded; and which has affected so largely the commerce of the world;
and the influence of which is now felt in every quarter of the globe.

The traveller has pleasure in recalling moments of this kind. I shall
not easily forget the delight I felt at the first sight of the Spanish
moss. It was in the first gray of the morning, and I was looking out
from the railway car, shading off with my hands the light of the lamps
that were still burning, that I might be the better able to see through
the window, when I beheld for the first time this curious parasite, of
which one had seen such frequent mention, hanging in slender streamers
of three or four feet in length from the boughs of the trees. I
immediately left my seat, and went to the outside of the car. I found
we were passing through a cedar swamp on a tressle-bridge of many miles
in length. We passed through several such swamps in the course of that
day, and wherever this was the case, the trees, of which the swamps
were just as full as the dry land, were always covered with this moss.
Old trees were entirely enveloped in it to the extremities of their
branches. As you approach the Gulf, the trees on the dry land as well
as those in swamps are shrouded in it. Its streamers are occasionally
two yards long near the coast. It is of a pale ashy colour, and gives
you the idea of the accumulated cobwebs of a thousand years.

[Sidenote: _A Night on the Rails._]

American ladies having been well broken in to the publicity of
their system of railway travelling, make the best of it, and seem
quite unconcerned about what would appear to those unused to it its
disagreeable incidents. Never but with one exception did I pass a night
on an American railway without finding a sleeping-car attached to the
train. It was in the South, and there happened to be about forty people
in the car, of whom eight or ten were married ladies travelling with
their husbands: like everybody one sees in America, they were young,
and of course, as all American young ladies are, were better-looking
than the generality of the fair sex. English ladies would probably,
under circumstances of so much publicity, have unnecessarily and
unwisely endeavoured to keep awake. But their American sisters passed
the night as comfortably as might be, each laying her head on her
husband’s shoulder for a pillow, and with their arms round each other,
or with their hands locked together. In the morning, when the train
stopped an hour for breakfast, they made their _toilette_ in the
carriage, there being generally abundance of water in a railway car,
with a mug to drink from, and a basin to wash in. They appeared all to
have with them brushes and combs, and towels and soap.

In travelling in the United States one is very much struck with the
great amount of sameness that is met with in many things. In outward
nature this is very observable. You go from New York to Charleston
on what appears to be one level. Throughout these nine hundred miles
you have no cuttings or embankments; at all events I do not recollect
having had to go through or to go round a single hill. Again, you may
go up the valley of the Mississippi on another longer level; and if you
start from Chicago to cross the Prairie and Plains, you cross another
thousand miles of level ground. Again, throughout all these long
levels, adding to them the space between Charleston and New Orleans,
there is in the soil a great sameness of colour. Except in the black
soil of the Prairies, and occasionally in the river bottoms—of which
latter you see little in railway travelling—yellow, of slightly varying
tints, is almost universal, whether the soil be sandy or clayey. And
then the forest which clothes this soil of the same colour and of
the same level, is also everywhere itself the same. The predominant
trees are fortunately the unfailing pine, and almost equally unfailing
oak. Sameness, too, but not quite to the same extent, characterises
the Great Lake region. There are glorious exceptions to this general
sameness in the Alleghanies, the Rocky Mountains, and California;
but these are not the situations in which the great masses of the
population have formed their homes. De Tocqueville and others have
observed a similar sameness in the ideas and customs of the Americans
themselves; and this they attribute to the completeness with which the
principles of democracy have been carried out both in their polity and
social arrangements. I have already noticed the extraordinary sameness
of their language, which, throughout the whole continent, admits of no
dialectical difference and, in passing, how great are the changes this
single fact implies have taken place in the conditions of human life,
when we recollect that in that little plat of ground of ancient Greece
every little town had a dialect of its own. The universality with
which any form of expression, any social practice, or even any state
of feeling, is abandoned or adopted throughout the vast Union, is to
those who observe these matters a very interesting fact in American
civilisation. The extent to which they are readers of newspapers is
not the cause of this, though of course it somewhat contributes to
it. The real cause is the urgent and uncontrollable desire in every
American to talk, and think, and live, and dress, and feel, and to do
everything just in the same way as other people; as we say here, to be
in the fashion, only that they apply the idea of fashion to everything.
Changes of this kind are wrought in America almost as if by magic.
There is in this a great balance of good, although it is so great a
check upon individuality, because it keeps the whole people advancing
together as one man.

[Sidenote: _Maize._]

In the agricultural reports of the United States maize is set down for
so many million bushels as almost to transcend the power of belief on
this side the water. How can so much be grown? how can so much be used?
are questions which occur to us. But after one has seen something of
America the feeling is changed into one of wonder at the inexhaustible
merits of this grain, and of its incalculable utility to man; and
one ceases to be surprised at finding it grown everywhere throughout
the Union on so large a scale. It is quite impossible that America
could have risen to her present greatness without it. While the hardy
pioneer of civilisation was subduing the forest, which reached from the
Atlantic to the valley of the Mississippi, there was nothing that could
have met his wants as maize did. As soon as he had felled the trees for
his log cabin, before the ground was cleared, or prepared sufficiently
for any other crop, he would put in his seed for a crop of maize,
which would be ready in a few months, perhaps before his log house was
finished, and would supply with food his family, and pigs, and any
other stock that he might have, till the next harvest. And when ripe,
it did not, like wheat and other grain, require immediate harvesting;
for nature had provided it with a thick strong stem to support it
against the wind, and with a sheath which kept it effectually from the
rain. And its yield, as it thus grew among the stumps of these forest
clearings, was very great. And now that the land has been cleared,
it still holds its ground as the chief crop almost everywhere, and
apparently as almost the only grain crop in many districts. It is
everywhere largely used as human food in a great variety of ways. It is
the winter food of the cattle, horses, and mules, which latter do all
the heavy work from Kentucky to New Orleans. The pork crop, too, of the
United States, which is one of its largest items of produce, is only
a certain portion of the maize crop in another form. The same may be
said of the enormous quantity of poultry produced everywhere throughout
the country. It is only transformed maize. Of all grains it is the
easiest to grow, the easiest to harvest, the easiest to keep, the
easiest to transport. It is good for man and for beast. It will grow
on any soil, and will yield in the rich bottoms of Ohio and Illinois a
hundred bushels an acre—and on some of these lands it has been grown
for twenty years in succession—and on the poor sands of South Carolina
will yield between twenty and thirty bushels, a quantity that is highly
remunerative, where the land costs nothing, and an old negro and an old
mule are all that are required for its culture. In America a head of
maize should be the national emblem.

[Sidenote: _The Forest._]

It did not strike me that the succession of trees in clearing forest
land was quite so regular as is commonly stated. I saw, for instance, a
different succession on the two sides of the same fence. The original
forest on both sides had been exclusively pine. Where the forest had
been entirely cleared off, the succession was again pine. But where the
large trees only had been removed the succession was oak. This went
some way towards showing that the amount of light and air decided which
was to come up.

In the Carolinas the forest is, along the railway, everywhere more or
less continuous: still it is all owned, as appears from the fencing.
The better trees are everywhere being cut for building, or fencing, or
firing; and the larger pines have all been tapped for turpentine. One
is surprised, at first, to see so little land cultivated along the line
of railway. The reason however is that, as a general rule, the good
land is along the banks of the streams which run from the Alleghanies
to the sea, that is, from west to east, while the railway runs from
north to south, so that in travelling along it you only get occasional
glimpses of the way in which culture is in these parts beginning, for
it is hardly more, to encroach on the forest.

In these latitudes the forest becomes a little diversified by the
appearance of several evergreens. One of the commonest is the evergreen
or live-oak. I frequently saw from the cars a small tree having very
much the appearance of our bay. There is an occasional magnolia. There
are several evergreen shrubs, and some creepers. In swampy places
there are long reaches of cane-brake. This is the Bambusa gracilis,
which we sometimes see in this country in gardens, in spots where
moisture and shelter can be combined. These cane- or bamboo-brakes
are evergreen impervious jungles about twenty feet high. But the most
interesting form to Northern eyes is that of the little palmetto palm.
Its fan-like leaf, however, is all that can be seen of it, for its
trunk scarcely rises above the ground. In some of the swamps around New
Orleans it and a kind of iris are the most conspicuous plants.

The question of the colonisation or resettlement of the South by the
North is simply one of £. _s._ _d._ Will it be more profitable for a
Northern man to grow cotton in the South, or wheat, pork, beef, &c. in
the West? People say Northern emigrants will never go to the poor lands
of the South till all the good land of the West is taken up. This is
quite a wrong way of putting the case between the two. A man would not
go to the South to grow wheat, beef, and pork. That can be done cheaper
in the fertile West. But it is not impossible that an equal amount of
capital and labour embarked in the cotton culture of the South might
produce a greater return. In that case the poor soils of the South
might be preferred to the rich soils of the West.

One infers how much more completely the fabric of society rested on
slavery in South Carolina than it did in Virginia, by the fact that
three fourths of the devastation caused by the great fire at Richmond
have been already repaired, while nothing had been done to repair the
damages done by the great fire at Charleston, which destroyed the
whole of the centre of the city. Literally not one single brick has
yet been laid upon another for this purpose. There stand the blackened
remains of churches, residences, and stores, just as if it were a city
of the dead.

[Sidenote: _A Charleston Sam Weller._]

Still, even here I was surprised at the number and magnitude of the
hotels. I had taken up my quarters at the Mills House, where I suppose
there were three hundred guests. I saw another, the Pavilion, quite
as large; and I was told of a third, the Charleston Hotel, which was
described to me as being much larger than either of the two just
mentioned.

Before I reached Charleston there had been some wet weather, and the
streets were muddy. I therefore used two pair of boots the first day
I was in the place. The next morning the Sam Weller of the hotel
refused to clean, or as he called it, to shine, more than one pair.
I remonstrated with him, but it was to no purpose, as he was quite
persuaded of the force of his own argument, ‘that if everyone in the
house was to wear two pair of boots a-day his work would be doubled.’
Boots was a Paddy, and, since his naturalisation in the land of
freedom, had become sure that he had as much right to form opinions for
himself, express them, and act upon them, as the President himself. I
carried my grievance to the manager. He promised redress, but the boots
were not cleaned, that is to say, not in the hotel. I mention this as
it was the only instance of _insubordination_ I met with in this class
in my tour through the United States.

Nature has done much for Charleston. Its fine harbour is formed by the
junction of two large navigable rivers, the Ashley and the Cooper.
It is free from yellow fever, the scourge of Mobile and New Orleans.
The orange and oleander grow in the spaces between its streets and
its houses. Hitherto it has been the chief winter resort of those in
the Northern States who were unable to bear the severity of their own
climate, and of those from the West Indies who were unable to bear
the heat of theirs. Thus the victims both of heat and of cold met in
Charleston, and each found in its delightfully tempered atmosphere
exactly what he sought. And the society of these visitors, combined
with that of the rich proprietors of the State who had their residences
here, made it a very gay and pleasant place. Of course America,
hard-worked and consumption-scourged above all other nations, ought to
have its Naples; and it will be equally a matter of course that the
Naples of America should temper gaiety with trade, and combine work
with idleness, and should not be entirely a population of do-nothings,
of Lazaroni, and of pleasure-seekers. Still, the feeling that came over
one at Charleston was, How far off this place is from the world! It was
not the distance that caused this feeling, for it is only nine hundred
miles from New York, while Chicago, where one has no feelings of this
kind, is three hundred miles further off. Perhaps fifty years hence,
when probably a busy white population will be cultivating the land
around it, there will be nothing in the place to suggest the thought
that, when there, one is out of the world.

[Sidenote: _Few English Travellers._]

I was surprised at finding how few Englishmen had, at all events of
late, been travelling in the Southern States. At Charleston, in a dozen
folio pages of names in the guest-book of the hotel, which I looked at
for this purpose, I could only see one entry from England. At Richmond
I only found two English names in forty folio pages, and the address
appended to these two names was Manchester. In the North I heard that
Lord Morley, and Lord Camperdown, and Mr. Cowper—I do not know whether
the Right Hon. W. Cowper was meant—had lately been through that part of
the country inspecting the common schools. But during my tour through
the United States, I did not fall in with a single English traveller,
nor did I fall in with one either on my outward or homeward voyage. All
my fellow-passengers on both occasions were Americans. Of course in
the summer—though it may be questioned whether that is, so decidedly
as most people suppose, the best season for travelling in the United
States—I might not have found my countrymen so conspicuous by their
absence. And yet there is no part of the world which Englishmen ought
to find so instructive and interesting. What is there in the world more
worthy of investigation than the existing condition of things, and the
events that are now taking place, upon this great continent, which
contains within itself everything that is necessary for the well-being
of man, which is indeed a world in itself, and which stands in the
same relation towards the Atlantic and Pacific oceans that this little
island does towards the Irish and North seas; and which, whatever else
may befall, will at all events be thoroughly Anglo-Saxon?

Wherever one went in the South, one heard instances of the hardships,
the deadliness, and the evils of the late war. Of the family of which
I saw most at Richmond, the three sons had been sent to the army. Of
these three one was killed, and another maimed for life. These were
men who were no longer young, and many a day in their long marches,
and when before the enemy, their commissariat having been utterly
exhausted, they had had nothing to eat but a few handfuls of horse
corn. There were regiments that did not bring home one fourth of the
number with which they originally went out; the rest having died of
disease, or fallen in battle. In the family of which I saw most at
Charleston there were two sons, the eldest only eighteen years of age.
They both enlisted in Hampton’s cavalry, for all above the age of
sixteen had to go. And so again at New Orleans the gentleman to whom I
was especially consigned, and who had held the commission of colonel in
the Confederate army, and had been a rich merchant of the place, told
me that he and his whole regiment were frequently without shoes, and
that on one occasion he went barefooted for six weeks continuously.

[Sidenote: _Who are now Schoolmasters in the South._]

One of the most lamentable results of the great cataclysm that ensued
on the close of the war, has been that almost a complete end has been
put to the education of Southern children. Formerly many were sent
to the North, but now parents have neither the inclination nor the
means to continue this practice. In the South itself schools did not
abound; and of those which existed before the war the greater number
have followed the fate of so many other Southern things. Some effort
is being made to remedy this. In one of the Southern cities I had been
advised to call on a gentleman who would be able to give me information
on these matters. I found him at last, after some trouble, teaching a
private school of his own. He was engaged in giving a French lesson.
I remember him as a remarkably handsome and well-mannered man. On my
saying something which implied astonishment at finding him so employed,
he replied that his profession was that of a lawyer; but that since the
war he had not been allowed to practise, because he was unable to take
the oaths which the North had imposed on all who had held any office
in the South during the war. But he added, ‘I am not in bad company,
for many of the best men in the South, beginning with General Lee, are
employed in teaching.’

While I was in the South the conventions were sitting. These were
assemblies elected under the new system of universal suffrage,
including the blacks, for the purpose of drawing up new constitutions
for their several States. Of course where the negroes were numerically
in the ascendant, the majority of the convention were either negroes
or negro nominees. I felt a repugnance to witness this degradation
of the whites; still it would have been foolish to have let pass the
opportunity for seeing what indications the blacks gave of fitness for
equal political power; and, as the governor of the State I was then in
offered to take me to the convention and introduce me to some of the
members, I accepted the offer. We had been talking on the irrepressible
subject of the negro, and I had said I thought the blacks ought to be
put on exactly the same footing as the whites. He had assented to this
idea, as it sounded very much like what he was there to maintain. But I
am not quite sure that he altogether approved of my explanation, when
I went on to say that what I meant was, ‘that the negro should be left
to work or starve, just as the white man was in New York, in England,
and everywhere else; that I did not at all see why the negro should
be petted, and patted on the back, and have soup given to him, while
he was doing nothing, and have expectations raised in his mind that
something would soon be done for him, which treatment could not in the
end be of any advantage at all to him, while it was very costly to the
whites.’ His reply to this was the offer I just mentioned to take me to
the convention and introduce me to some of the members who were among
the leading partisans of the negro race in the State.

I was present for two hours in this convention; during that time no
speeches were made; I was therefore unable to judge in this manner of
the intelligence and _animus_ of the black members. I did not, however,
leave the convention without a short conversation with one of them. He
was a man of unmixed African blood, and, seeing me conversing with the
white whom he regarded as the head of his party, he left his place in
the house, and came up to me and held out his hand. I extended mine in
return. On taking hold of it, he accosted me with the words,

‘Sir, you then believe that the franchise is a God-given right.’

I said ‘that was not my belief.’

‘Why?’ he asked, rather astonished.

‘Because,’ I said, ‘it was given to you by Mr. Lincoln and the North.’

‘No, sir,’ he replied, ‘it is a God-given right.’

[Sidenote: _The Southern Conventions._]

‘If it is a God-given right,’ I rejoined, ‘how does it come to pass
that so few of mankind have ever possessed it?’

He then inquired what limitation I would put to the ‘right.’ I told him
that I did not think it wise or just that those who had no property
should possess the power of imposing taxes on those who had property,
and deciding how the proceeds of the taxes were to be disposed of;
and that the argument would be strengthened, if these persons without
property were also without the knowledge requisite for enabling them to
read the constitution of their State. Instead of replying to this, he
returned to his seat.

I give the above dialogue as a specimen of what are a negro’s ideas on
the great subject of the day in that part of the world. I afterwards
heard that the gentleman who had been speaking to me was the most
prominent negro in the State.

In the convention I have just spoken of there was nothing remarkable in
the appearance of the members of either race. In another convention,
however, where I spent a morning, this was not the case; for I did not
see a single white who had at all the air of a legislator, or even the
appearance of a respectable member of society. Here I heard a man who
was black, or as nearly black as one could be, make several speeches.
He assumed a kind of leadership, or at all events of authority in
the assembly, to which, as far as I could judge, he was most fully
entitled. He certainly was the best speaker I heard in the United
States, or, indeed, ever heard anywhere else, as far as his knowledge
went. He spoke with perfect ease, and complete confidence in himself,
and at the same time quite in good taste. He said nothing but what
appeared to be most reasonable, proper, and fair to both races. He was
for putting an end at once to all ideas and hopes of confiscation on
the part of the blacks, and to the fears of the whites on the subject,
by some authoritative declaration; for he believed that these hopes and
fears were giving false expectations to his own race, and causing much
uncertainty in the minds of the whites, which prevented their setting
about the re-establishment of cultivation on their estates. He had a
good musical voice, and he could vary its tones at his pleasure. His
thoughts were clearly conceived and clearly put. I must not, however,
omit to mention that, though the traces of white blood were so slight
in the colour of his skin, he had most completely the head and features
of the European—a high forehead, a thin straight nose, and a small chin
and month. His hair was woolly in the extreme. I afterwards understood
that the whites in this convention, who were so greatly his inferiors
in debate, were almost all Northern adventurers and ‘mean whites’; the
whole of the upper class having declined to take any part in forming
the new constitution.

[Sidenote: _South Carolina Orphan Asylum._]

I was taken over the South Carolina Orphan Asylum. It is a large fine
building in the town of Charleston, with well-kept and extensive
grounds around it for the children to play in. The number of children
who are within the walls is two hundred. They are fed, clothed,
educated, and placed out in life by the institution. The expenses were
formerly divided between the State, a numerous body of subscribers, and
the interest that accrued from some very considerable bequests. But
during the war these investments went the way of all other investments
in the South. They were placed in Confederate bonds, which are now
worth nothing. Pretty nearly, therefore, the whole of the burden of
maintaining the asylum has since been met by the State alone, in its
present condition of extreme impoverishment. All the children from the
different class rooms were summoned together for my inspection, into
a large room somewhat resembling a theatre, in which they are taught
music and some other subjects collectively. Small and great, they all
appeared to be very well under control. They seemed also to be happy
and healthy, but with more (which in those who lived all the year at
Charleston could hardly have been otherwise) of the Southern lily than
of the Northern rose in their complexions. As might have been expected,
there was not the animation and zeal one sees in Northern schools,
worked at the highest of high pressures. But it is a noble institution:
in it Mr. Memminger, the first Secretary of the Confederate Treasury,
was brought up.




CHAPTER IX.

 COLD IN SOUTH CAROLINA AND GEORGIA—CURIOUS APPEARANCE OF ICE—TIME
 NOT VALUED IN THE SOUTH—WHY AMERICANS WILL NOT CULTIVATE THE
 OLIVE—TEA MIGHT GROW IN GEORGIA—ATLANTA BOUND TO BE GREAT—CATTLE
 BADLY OFF IN WINTER—A VIRGINIAN’S RECOLLECTION OF THE WAR—HIS
 POSITION AND PROSPECTS—APPROACH TO MOBILE BY THE ALABAMA
 RIVER—MOBILE—THE HARBOUR—WHY NO AMERICAN SHIPS THERE—A DAY ON THE
 GULF—PONCHATRAIN—NEW ORLEANS—FRENCH SUNDAY MARKET—FRENCH APPEARANCE
 OF TOWN—A NEW ORLEANS GENTLEMAN ON THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH—BISHOP
 ELECT OF GEORGIA—MISSISSIPPI—THE CEMETERIES—EXPENSIVENESS OF
 EVERYTHING—TRANSATLANTIC NEWS—FUSION OF NORTH AND SOUTH—FRENCH
 HALF-BREEDS—ROADS—THE BEST IN THE WORLD—APPROACH TO NEW ORLEANS BY
 LAND—SUGAR PLANTATIONS—A PRAYER FOR A BROTHER MINISTER.


I left Charleston at midday. It was a cold day, but there was no ice in
the town. A few miles out of the town, on the Augusta railway, it was
freezing sharply, the railway-side ditches were coated with ice, and
the ground was white with hoarfrost wherever the sun had not touched
it. I supposed that the warmer air from the bay had kept the frost out
of the town. All through that day in travelling as far as Augusta, and
for the next two days, I found the frost in the country between Augusta
and Atlanta very severe. We should have considered them unusually cold
days in England; and yet there was not a cloud to intercept a ray of
the Southern sun. To my sensations it was colder than I found it on
any other occasion during my tour in the United States. I mention this
because it is satisfactory to collect indications of large districts of
the South being adapted to white labour. No doubt the summer throughout
this region is very warm, but here it was cold enough to brace up
relaxed constitutions.

[Sidenote: _The Olive unfitted for America._]

I here saw an effect of frost, which, I suppose from differences in
radiation and evaporation, is never seen in England. Everywhere along
the railway embankments and cuttings, the ice appeared to have shot out
in rays or spikes, three or four inches in length, and then to have
bent over. When the rays were shorter they remained straight. I asked a
gentleman how the people of the country explained the phenomenon. ‘Our
explanation of it is,’ he replied, ‘that in these parts the land spues
up the ice.’

A Southern man does not set the same value on time a Northern one does.
The day, he thinks, will be long enough for all he has to do. I often
saw trains stopped, not at a station, for the purpose of taking up or
putting down a single passenger. I even saw this done that a parcel
or letter might be taken from a person standing by the railway side.
On one occasion an acquaintance with whom I was travelling that day,
and myself, both happened to have had no dinner. We mentioned this to
the conductor, and asked him if he could manage in any way to let us
have some supper. ‘Oh, yes,’ he readily replied, ‘I will at eleven
o’clock stop the train at a house in the forest, where I sometimes
have had supper myself. I will give you twenty minutes.’ I suppose the
other passengers, none of whom left their seats, imagined that we had
stopped to repair some small damage, or to take in wood or water, for
on returning to the car we heard no observations made on the delay.

Whenever I suggested to Americans the probability that their long range
of Southern coast was well suited for the culture of the olive, the
suggestion was met with merriment. ‘There is no one in this country,’
they would say, ‘who looks fifteen or twenty years ahead’ (the time it
takes for an olive tree to come into profitable bearing). ‘Everybody
here supposes that long before so many years have expired he shall have
sold his land very advantageously, or that his business will have taken
him to some other part of the country, or that he shall have made his
fortune and retired from business.’

The same objection does not lie against the culture of tea, for which
the uplands of Georgia appeared well adapted.

Atlanta I thought the most flourishing place in the South. I saw
several manufactories there, and much building was going on. It has
34,000 inhabitants. ‘Sir,’ said an Atlantan gentleman to me, ‘this
place is bound to become great and prosperous, because it is the most
central town of the Southern States.’ I suppose he had not yet been
able to divest his mind of the idea that the Southern States formed a
political unit, and must have a central capital.

[Sidenote: _A Virginian’s Recollections of the War._]

The cattle of the South must, during the winter, be among the most
miserable of their kind. I saw nothing at all resembling what we
call pastures; and if such institutions (in America everything is an
institution, even the lift in an hotel) are known in the South, they
can be of little use at that time of year, for every blade of grass
in America is then withered and dry. The cattle appeared to be kept
generally in the woods, and in the maize fields, where of course they
could get nothing but the leaves that were hanging on the dead stems.
In the North, where the dead grass is buried in snow, and the cattle
therefore must be housed and kept on artificial food and grain, they
are sufficiently well off; while their brethren in the South become the
victims of a more beneficent climate.

I sometimes repeat the remarks of persons I casually met, without
noticing whether I accept or disagree with the statements they
contain, or the spirit which appears to animate them, because what
I thought about the matter is of no consequence, while by reporting
occasionally what I heard I enable others to form some idea of what
passes in the minds of the people I came in contact with. For this
purpose I will report what a fellow-passenger said to me one night
on our way through the interminable forest in Alabama. I had several
times during the day had some talk with this gentleman, and had been
much struck with him and interested in what he said. He was a handsome
man—a very noble-looking specimen of humanity; and his manners and
ideas corresponded to his appearance. At night we were seated together
talking about the war, and the prospects of the country, when he gave
me the following account of himself. He was a Virginian, and before
the war had possessed a good property. Though disliking the Yankees
(I am giving his own words) and their interference with the internal
affairs of the Southern States, he had at first opposed the war. But
when his State had decided for it, he took up his rifle, and joined it
unreservedly. Everything he had possessed had been lost in the war;
but he was determined neither to complain, nor to be beholden to any
man. It was not a pleasant thing, for one who had lived as a gentleman,
to work for others; but that was what he was now doing, for he had
become travelling clerk for a large mercantile house. The period of his
agreement had nearly expired, and if it was not renewed, and he could
get nothing better, he would drive a dray. He spoke bitterly of the
Yankees, for their greed of plunder, and for their want of a sense of
honour. When the South surrendered, they did it in perfect good faith;
acknowledging that fortune had entirely decided against them, and
determining to submit honestly to the award. But the Yankees would not
believe in their good faith, and had sent into every Southern State a
military dictator with an army, to oppress and insult the whites, and
to keep them in subjection to the blacks. He had loved his country, and
been proud of it: but now he had no country, no home, no prospects. He
said the blacks fought with more desperation than the Yankees. He had
been through the whole war, and had had plenty of opportunities for
comparing them. He would rather meet three Yankees than two blacks. The
black was easily wrought up into a state of enthusiasm, and would fight
like a fanatic. The Yankee was always calculating chances, and taking
care of himself. The West it was that decided the war; and he thought
it should have arbitrated at first, and prevented the fighting. I lost
sight of this fallen but brave-hearted Virginian on the steps of the
St. Charles Hotel at New Orleans, to which he was so obliging as to
guide me on our arrival at that city. He was then on his way to Texas.

[Sidenote: _Mobile._]

The railway does not run into Mobile, but ends at a wharf, about twenty
miles from the city, on the Tensas (pronounced Tensaw), a kind of loop
branch of the Alabama, which it rejoins at Mobile. It is a fine broad
piece of water, and its banks are clothed with the undisturbed primæval
forest, which is always to the European a sight of great interest. On
unloading the train I saw that we had picked up during the night a
dozen fine bucks, which we were to take on to Mobile. I had observed
in the early morning two or three small herds of wild deer feeding in
the forest. They seem to have become accustomed to the locomotive.
Even here it was freezing very sharply, and the buckets of water on
board the steamer were thickly coated with ice. This frost, I found at
Mobile, had killed all the young wood of the orange trees. The crew of
the steamer were negroes, and I was surprised to see them on so cold
a morning washing their woolly heads in buckets of water drawn from
the river, and then leaving their wet hair and faces to be dried by
the cold morning air. At the junction of the Tensas and Alabama there
was a great deal of swampy land, partly covered with reeds, and much
shallow water, upon which were large flocks of wild fowl. The river was
here full of snags and sawyers, and its navigation was still further
impeded by a fortification of piles the Confederates had driven across
it during the war, to keep the enemy from getting up to the city.
This approach to Mobile had more of the air of novelty about it than
anything I had yet seen in America. It made me feel that I was really
in a new world.

As I intended to make no stay at Mobile, I did not use any of the
letters of introduction I had with me, thinking I should in a short
time see more of the men and manners of the place, if I accompanied
a travelling acquaintance I had made, in his calls upon the firms
with whom he had to transact business. I was four times during the
morning invited, not to liquor, that expression I never once heard
in America, but to take a drink. There is much heartiness of feeling
here, and everybody carries out, to the full extent, the American
practice of shaking hands with everybody, which is a rational way of
expressing goodwill without saying anything. I walked about a mile out
into the environs to see the houses of the merchants and well-to-do
inhabitants. I passed three hospitals, one for yellow-fever cases
that can pay, one for yellow-fever cases that cannot pay, and one
for general cases. The streets of the town were full of pedestrians
and of traffic. In this respect it bore a very favourable comparison
with Charleston, where nothing was going on. The population amounts
to about 34,000. The Spaniards who originally settled the place have
been utterly obliterated. On inquiry I found that none had remained in
the city, being quite unable in any department of business to support
the competition of the Anglo-Saxon, but that among the mean whites, at
some little distance from Mobile, a few Spanish names were to be found.
These remnants of the original settlers the Alabamans call Dagos, a
corruption of the common Spanish name of Diego.

[Sidenote: _A Day on the Gulf of Mexico._]

The great cotton ships cannot come to up to Mobile. There is, however,
a magnificent bay, in the form of a great lake with a narrow inlet from
the sea, in which they ride at anchor, waiting for their cargoes, at
a distance of between thirty and forty miles from the city. I counted
thirty-seven of these ships. They were almost all English. Some said
there was not a single American among them. A few years ago far the
greater part of them would have been American; but since they have
taxed heavily everything received into the country, or manufactured in
it, they have ceased to be able to build or to sail ships as cheaply as
we can.

I shall never forget the day I passed on the Gulf of Mexico in
going from Mobile to New Orleans. The air was fresh and had just
the slightest movement in it. The sky was unclouded, and the sun
delightfully warm. We have pleasant enough days at home occasionally,
but this belonged to quite another order of things. And as the darkness
came on, the night was as fine and bright, after its kind, as the day
had been. Many sat talking on the deck till long after the sun was
down. Some, I suppose, felt that this would be their only day on the
Gulf of Mexico.

The communication between Mobile and New Orleans is not carried on by
the mouth of the Mississippi, but by the Lake of Ponchatrain. This is
a large piece of very shallow water, seldom more than seven feet deep,
which communicates with the sea. A railway is carried out into the lake
on piles for a distance of five miles. At the terminus of this long
pier the steamers deposit and receive their passengers.

On entering the city, at the other terminus of this railway, at
half-past six o’clock in the morning, the first sight that attracted
attention was the French Sunday Market. This is what everyone who
visits New Orleans is expected to see. It is a general market, and the
largest of the week. I do not remember ever to have seen a larger or a
busier one. What attracted my attention most, on passing through it,
was the great quantity and variety of wild fowl exhibited for sale.
The _Marché des Fleurs_ was very good. In short there was an abundant
supply of everything. The shops in the neighbourhood were all open;
and in the American part of the city also, I saw several open on the
morning of this day.

New Orleans still retains very much of the air of a French city.
Many of the streets are narrow, and paved (which I saw nowhere else
in America) with large blocks of granite. This is brought from New
England. Something however of the kind was necessary here, on account
of the wet alluvial soil on which the city stands; it would be truer
to say on which it floats. The houses are generally lofty, and their
external character is rather French than English. The French language
is spoken by a large part of the population. In the street cars, one is
almost sure to hear it, coming often from the mouths of coloured people.

[Sidenote: _Episcopal Church at New Orleans._]

While at New Orleans I heard Dr. Beckwith, the Bishop elect of Georgia.
His church is about a mile and a half from the St. Charles’s Hotel,
in one of the best suburbs of the city. In going I asked a gentleman,
who was seated next to me in the street car, the way. He replied
that he was one of the doctor’s congregation, and would be my guide.
This led to some conversation; he said ‘that of late years, in New
Orleans and elsewhere in the States, the Episcopal Church had begun
to exert itself, and was now doing wonders in bringing people into
its communion.’ I told him that only a few days before I had seen it
stated in an editorial of a New York paper, ‘that the Episcopal Church
was now quite the church of the best society in the United States;
and that if one wished to get into good society, it was wise to join
this communion.’ He replied ‘that statements of this kind read well
in newspapers, and that of course there were some people who could be
influenced by such considerations; but that in his opinion the most
effective reasons for attracting people to the Episcopal Church was the
character of the Church itself, and of those who did belong and had
belonged to it. It was an historical church, with a grand theological
literature of its own, and that, indeed, almost the whole literature
of England appeared to belong to the Episcopal Church; and it had,
which he thought the most potent reason of all, a definite creed and a
dignified ritual.’

Dr. Beckwith’s congregation consisted of about a thousand very
well-dressed people. As is usual everywhere in Episcopal churches in
America, there was an offertory; and I saw, as its pecuniary result,
four large velvet dishes piled full of greenbacks, placed in the hands
of the three officiating clergymen. Nobody gives less than a quarter of
a dollar note. The Bishop elect preached. He is a very good-looking,
able, and eloquent man. He ridiculed the idea of a ‘psalm-singing’
eternity, and affirmed that the possession of knowledge would be an
immeasurably nobler means of happiness. But if we concede this, there
will still remain the question whether the exercise of the feelings of
the heart would not confer on the majority of the human race far more
happiness than the exercise of the powers of the intellect.

I looked into another large Episcopal church on my way to Dr.
Beckwith’s, and found in it several young men teaching Sunday classes.

One gets so accustomed in the lakes, rivers and harbours of America,
to vast expanses of water, that the first sight of the Mississippi at
New Orleans becomes on that account more disappointing to most people
than it otherwise would be. As you cross the Levee, you see before you
a stream not three quarters of a mile wide. The houses on the opposite
side do not appear to be at even that humble distance. The traveller
remembers how many streams he has crossed, particularly on the eastern
and southern coast, some of them even unnoticed on the map he is
carrying with him, but which had wider channels. And so he becomes
dissatisfied with his first view of the Father of Waters. Still, there
he has before him, in that stream not three quarters of a mile wide,
the outlet for the waters of a valley as large as half of Europe.
What mighty rivers, commingled together, are passing before him—the
Arkansas, the Red River, the Platte, the Missouri, the Ohio, the
Wabash, the Cumberland, the Tennessee! How great then must be the depth
of the channel through which this vast accumulation of water is being
conveyed to the ocean! On this last point I questioned several persons
in the city, getting from all the same answer, that several attempts
had been made to fathom this part of the river, but that none had been
attended with success.

[Sidenote: _The Cemeteries._]

On my calling the attention of the stout, mediæval, coloured female who
had charge of the baths of the St. Charles’s Hotel, to the water in the
one she was preparing for me,—for it was of the colour, and not far
from the consistency of pea-soup,—she convinced me in a moment of my
ignorance, and of the irrational character of my remark. ‘Child,’ she
said, ‘it is Mississippi river, which we all have to drink here all our
lives.’

I visited the celebrated burial grounds of New Orleans, one in the
suburbs, and three others contiguous to one another, in an older part
of the city. None of them are more than two or three acres in size.
In each case the enclosure was surrounded with a high wall, which was
chambered on the inner side for the reception of coffins. The whole
peculiarity of these burial grounds arises from the fact that, the
soil being too swampy to admit of interment, the coffin must be placed
in some receptacle above ground. Many of the trades of the city, and
several other associations, appear to have buildings of their own in
the cemeteries, for the common reception of the bodies of those who
had in life belonged to the brotherhood. Most of the families, too, of
the place appear to have their own above-ground tombs. They are almost
universally of brick, plastered outside, and kept scrupulously clean
with whitewash. It was on a Sunday evening that I visited the cemetery
in the suburbs. It was very cold on that evening to my sensations,
and so I suppose it must have felt much colder to people who were
accustomed to the climate of New Orleans; still I saw many persons,
sometimes alone, and sometimes in parties, sitting or standing by the
tombs that contained the remains of those who had been dear to them,
and the recollection of whom they still cherished. In some cases I saw
one man, two men, or more than two, seated at a grave smoking. In some
cases there would be a whole family. This I noticed particularly at
what was far the best monument in the place. It was one that had been
raised to the memory of a young man who had fallen in the late war.
There was a small granite tomb, over which rose a pillar of granite
bearing the inscription. A little space all round was paved with the
same material, and this was edged with a massive rim, also of granite,
about two feet high. Upon this were seated many of his sorrowing
relatives, old and young. In the same cemetery I saw two other
monuments to young men who had died soldiers’ deaths in the Confederate
service. On each of the three, the inscription ran that the deceased
had died in the discharge of his duty, or in defence of the rights of
his country, or some expression was used to indicate the enthusiastic
feeling of the South. One was stated to have been the last survivor of
eight children, and the stone went on to say that his parents felt that
they had given their last child to their country and to God. These were
all English inscriptions; but I saw some that were in two languages,
English being mixed in some cases with French, in others with German.
I saw no inscriptions that had any direct reference in any way to what
Christians believe.

[Sidenote: _Amalgamation of North and South._]

At New Orleans, fifteen hundred miles from New York, you get, in your
morning paper, whatever was known in London yesterday of English and
European news. And this department of an American journal contains a
great deal more than we, in this country, are in the habit of seeing in
the _Times_ and other English papers, as the messages brought to us by
the Atlantic cable; because we want intelligence only from the United
States, whereas they wish to get from us not only what is going on in
England, but in every part of Europe, and in fact in every part of the
Old World.

As one is thus day after day, whether you be in the centre, or
thousands of miles away, at some almost unknown extremity, of this vast
transatlantic region, kept well informed as to what is passing over
almost all the earth, one feels that there are agencies at work amongst
us which in some respects render ‘the wisdom of the ancients’ a little
obsolete. Formerly it would have been thought impossible to harmonise
such discordant elements as the North and the South. How could they
ever dwell together as brethren, who were locally so remote from each
other, that while one was basking in a sub-tropical sun, the other
was shrinking from the nipping frosts of the severest winter; whose
institutions, too, and interests, and antecedents had in many essential
points been very dissimilar; and whose differences at last had broken
out into a fierce and sanguinary war? Could they ever be fused into a
single homogeneous people? Down to the times of our fathers, it would
have been quite impossible. Each would then have kept only to his own
region, and known no influences but those which were native to it.
But now we have changed all that. A few threads of wire overhead, and
a few bars of iron on the levelled ground, will do all that is wanted.
For extreme remoteness they have substituted so close a contiguity that
the North and South can now talk together. The dissimilar institutions,
interests, and antecedents of the past, however strong they may be in
themselves, become powerless when something stronger has arisen; and
this new power is now vigorously at work undermining and counteracting
their effects. And it is a power that will also exorcise envy, hatred,
and malice. Men are what their ideas are, for it is ideas that make
the man. And every morning these two people have the same ideas, and
the same facts out of which ideas are made, put in the same words
before them. The wire threads overhead do this. And if a Southern
man, from what he reads this morning, thinks that his interests call
him to the North, or a Northern man that his call him to the South,
the railway, like the piece of carpet in the Eastern story, will
transport them hither and thither in a moment. It ensures that there
shall be a constant stream of human beings flowing in each direction.
Everyone can foresee the result—that there must, sooner or later, be
one homogeneous people. Formerly the difference of their occupations
produced difference of feeling, and was a dissociating cause. Now it
will lead to rapid, constant, and extensive interchange of productions,
by the aid of the telegraph and railway. Each will always be occupied
with the thought of supplying the wants of the other. And this will
lead to social intercourse, and the union of families. So that what
was impossible before is what must be now.

[Sidenote: _High Prices._]

Everything in the United States, except railway fares and the _per
diem_ charges of hotels, is unreasonably dear; and the hotels
themselves participate in the general irrationality on this subject
as soon as you order anything that is not down in the list of what is
allowed for the daily sum charged you. I never got a fire lighted in my
bed-room for a few hours for less than a dollar, that is 3_s._ 6_d._;
or half a dozen pieces washed for less than a dollar and a half. But
the one matter of all in which the charges are the most insane is that
of hackney coaches and railway omnibuses. You get into an omnibus at
the station to be carried two or three hundred yards to your hotel. As
soon as the vehicle begins to move, the conductor begins to levy his
black mail. He is only doing to you what his own government is doing
to him. And in America it seems to be taken for granted that one will
pay just what he is ordered to pay. ‘Sir,’ he addresses you, ‘you must
pay now; three quarters of a dollar for yourself, and a quarter of
a dollar for each piece,’ that is of luggage. You have perhaps four
pieces, being an ignorant stranger; if you had been a well-informed
native you would have had only one piece; and for these four pieces and
yourself you pay about 7_s._ In an English railway omnibus you would
have paid 6_d._ or 1_s._ The hackney coaches are very much worse. I
found a driver in New York who would take me for a short distance for
a dollar and a half, but I never found so reasonable a gentleman in
the profession elsewhere. At New Orleans there appear to be a great
many hackney coaches, all apparently quite new, with a great deal
of silver-plated mounting about them, almost as if they had been
intended for civic processions on the scale of our Lord Mayor’s show.
Each of them is drawn by a very fair pair of horses. I once counted
two-and-thirty of these coaches standing for hire, on a rainy day, at
the door of the St. Charles’s Hotel; and I was told that it was their
rule not to move off the stand for less than two dollars, or to take
one out to dinner, and bring one back, for less than ten dollars.

Books of travel in the United States generally contain some remarks on
the personal attractions of the mixed race in New Orleans. From the
little I saw of them, I can add that they appeared to me as _spirituel_
as the French themselves. I am more disposed to believe that this is
hereditary, than that it is the result merely of imitation. But with
respect to their personal appearance, after having of late seen so
many of the coarse and ill-visaged half-breeds in which an Anglo-Saxon
was the father, I was much struck with their superiority in face and
figure. The features of many might almost have been called delicate
and refined; and it was so, strange to say, even when very perceptible
traces of the African nose and lips remained, and these still
surmounted with the African wool. I understood that this was also to a
great extent the case where a Spaniard was the father. The reason of
this difference I believe to be a very obvious one, that Frenchmen and
Spaniards, having much smaller bones than the Northern nations, are
better able on that account to correct, in their mixed descendants,
the grossness of the physiognomy and figure of the African. The
German half-breeds are still more unattractive than the Anglo-Saxon;
the Scandinavian are worse; but the worst of all are those whose
long-headed and high cheek-boned fathers come from the north of the
Tweed.

[Sidenote: _The Best Road in the World._]

No one without having seen the thing himself—and the jolting will
impress it on his memory—can form any proper conception of the holes,
the mud, and the pools of water which not unfrequently constitute what
is called in America a road. At Augusta I had seen axles disappear
in the main streets. But the most advanced specimen of this kind of
means of communication I ever passed over, was in going to the station
of the Mississippi and Tennessee railway at New Orleans. I could not
see or hear that any attempt had ever been made to form a road. The
traffic was great, and was of course confined by the houses to a narrow
street. It was a natural swamp, and there had been lately a great deal
of rain. My reflections on coming at last to the station were, that
American horses were wonderful animals, and that in nothing did the
Americans themselves show their inventive powers so triumphantly as
in constructing carriages which could carry heavy loads day after day
through such difficulties;—I do not say through such roads, because
there was nothing but a collection of the hindrances to travelling
which a road is made to remedy.

This is a subject on which the Americans themselves are very tolerant
and easily satisfied. ‘Sir,’ said a gentleman to me, on the top of
Wells and Fargo’s coach, as we were passing over the Plains to Denver,
‘Sir, this is the finest piece of road in the world.’ As nothing had
been said previously about roads, and as what we were passing along was
merely a freight-track on the dry prairie, four inches deep in dust and
sand and earth in fine weather, and as many or more inches deep in mud
in wet weather, I intimated that I believed I had not heard rightly
his remark. He then repeated his assertion even more emphatically than
at first, ‘that it was the best piece of road in the world.’ I was
beginning to explain to him, as courteously as I could, why I should
hardly have ventured to call it a road at all, when he stopped me short
with, ‘Sir, we have no faith in European practices. I am a judge of
roads. I have seen all kinds of roads; and I have seen roads in all
kinds of places; and this is just what I said it was, the finest piece
of road in the world.’ Over this model road, sometimes with six good
horses, never with less than four, we were able to manage about six
miles an hour.

The railroad from New Orleans, for the first mile or two, lies through
a most dreary dismal swamp. The water stands everywhere. The palmetto
and the swamp cedar grow out of the water. The trees are completely
shrouded with the grey Spanish moss. The trees and the moss look as if
they had long been dead. One who enters the city by this approach (had
ever any other great city such an approach?) must carry with him some
not very encouraging thoughts. Whenever in the summer or autumn the
wind blows from this direction, I suppose it will remind him of the
yellow fever, the horrible scourge of the place.

[Sidenote: _A Prayer for a Brother Minister._]

The swamp I just mentioned is succeeded by sugar plantations, the
costly machinery of which had been destroyed during the war. They
now appeared to be used as grazing farms for cattle brought up from
Texas. On one of these ruined plantations I saw some hedges of the
Cherokee rose. This is an evergreen, and makes too wide a hedge,
though its height may be an advantage in that climate. It is a common
opinion in New Orleans that all these sugar plantations will eventually
be re-established; but that this will never be done by the present
proprietors, who are all ruined, and who will have to sell the land
at a merely nominal price, which is all that the land without the
machinery is worth. Those who will buy the land will be companies, or
Northern men who will have capital enough to purchase new machinery,
and to pay the heavy costs of carrying on the cultivation of the cane
and manufacture of the sugar.

Americans are very careful not to give offence in what they say to
others. An American bishop remarked to me that the only exception to
this rule was to be found among ministers of religion, and among them
only in their prayers. He mentioned, as an instance, something that
had occurred at a public meeting at which he had himself been present.
A minister had opened the proceedings with prayer. He was followed by
a rival preacher. The latter, after dwelling for some time on general
topics, at last came up to his opponent in the following way: he prayed
that the gifts of the Spirit might be poured out on all his brethren in
the ministry abundantly, and then added, ‘and on behalf of our brother
whose words we have just heard, we offer this special supplication,
that his heart may become as soft as his head.’




CHAPTER X.

 MY ONLY DELAY ON AN AMERICAN RAILWAY—NO CONCEALING ONE’S
 NATIONALITY—RAILWAY COW-PLOUGH—PISTOLS—MEMPHIS—EMIGRATION FROM
 THE SOUTH DEPRECATED—TRUE METHOD OF RESUSCITATION—THE MINISTER’S
 STUDY—CONVERSATION WITH TWO MINISTERS—INVITATION TO ‘GO TO CHURCH’
 150 MILES OFF—LUXURY DOES NOT SAP THE MILITARY SPIRIT—MRS. READ—ENTRY
 INTO EDEN—SHARE A BED-ROOM WITH A CALIFORNIAN—HOW CALIFORNIA WAS
 CIVILISED—HOW A SITE UPON THE SWAMP WAS CREATED FOR CAIRO—DECLINE THE
 FOURTH PART OF A BED-ROOM AT ODIN—‘BE GOOD TO YOURSELF.’


One hears a great deal of accidents on American railways, and they
certainly appear to be very frequent, and often to be most fearful. It
is not an uncommon consequence of a railway accident in winter that a
great part of the passengers are burnt to death. This arises from the
fact that an American railway car is a long box containing between
fifty and sixty people, generally with a red-hot stove in winter at
each end, and without any possible means of egress except by the doors
at each end. The natural issue of this is that when an accident takes
place, the carriages are forced close together, the doors are thus
shut, and the stoves being overturned, or the crushed-in ends of the
carriages brought in contact with them, the train is in a few minutes
in flames. But as the Americans have more than thirty-eight thousand
miles of railway at work, which is more than three times as much as we
have in the United Kingdom, they are entitled to a good many accidents.
My own experience, but it is limited to eight thousand miles, is in
favour of the safety of American railway travelling. No train I was in
ever met with an accident. The only delay I ever had to submit to was
caused by a luggage train ahead having crushed a rail. And this delay
of four hours was not altogether wasted time, for besides giving one an
opportunity for taking a little walk in an American forest, it was the
cause of one’s hearing the following piece of wisdom: ‘There are two
things a man ought to bear well: what he can help, and what he cannot
help;’ and the following specimen of infantile Transatlantic English:
‘Mother! Fix me good. Fix me good.’ The first came from a gentleman ‘on
board’ the train, whom his friends called General, and was addressed to
some impatient passengers. The latter came from a little sobbing child
of two or three years of age, who wanted to be placed in an easier
position.

[Sidenote: _No Concealing One’s Nationality._]

In my tour throughout the greater part of the Union I was never
mistaken for a native. On some occasions, before I had spoken a word I
was addressed as an Englishman. I could not imagine what it was that
revealed my nationality. Was it my dress? or the look of my luggage?
or was it my manner? It once happened—it was between Gordonsville and
Richmond—that a gentleman in the train even went still further, by
divining at a glance not only my nationality, but also that I was a
clergyman; for he began, ‘I suppose, sir, I am addressing an English
clergyman.’ I was puzzled, and could only be certain that it was not
my dress that had enabled him to make the discovery. The single point
at which their sagacity was ever at fault, appeared to be the motive
which had induced me to undertake so long a journey (of course I am
only speaking of the persons one casually meets in a railway car). In
the South, and up the Mississippi, I frequently heard the supposition
that I had come across the water to establish some kind of business.
I was supposed on the prairies to be speculating in land; in the
Rocky Mountains to have an eye to gold mining. But to go back to the
original point. I was once told what it was that had betrayed me on
that particular occasion, and to that particular gentleman. He had
taken his seat at the same breakfast table as myself, at the Gayoso
Hotel, at Memphis. We had not been talking together long, when he
announced to me that I was an Englishman, and how he had made the
discovery. ‘Sir,’ he said, ‘it is impossible for a foreigner to escape
detection in this country. His speech always betrays him. There is a
harshness and a coarseness in foreign tones which an American instantly
observes, because Americans themselves all speak with soft and musical
intonations; it is natural to them.’

[Sidenote: _Memphis._]

The railway cow-catcher, of which we used to see frequent mention
in books of American travel, appears now to have been superseded by
another contrivance with a different form; for in the United States
nothing remains long in one form. The new form resembles that of the
snow-plough, and it must act by partially lifting what it comes in
contact with, and then throwing it off to the right or left, as it may
happen. This cow-plough, though evidently superior to any contrivance
for picking up or catching the cow, does not always do its work.
Not far from the town of Jackson, we came up with one of these poor
animals that happened to be lying on the rails. On this occasion the
plough went over it, and so did the first two or three carriages;
till at last the unhappy brute got fast fixed among the springs and
wheels of the car I was in. The train was stopped, and the cow taken
out, which, though horribly mangled, proved to be still alive. The
conductor called out for the loan of a pistol to enable him to put it
out of its misery. In an instant almost from every window on that side
the train a hand was extended offering the desired instrument. On my
making some observation on the number of pistols that were forthcoming
ready loaded, at a moment’s notice, the gentleman seated next to me
replied, ‘that it was quite possible that I was the only man unarmed
in the train. That formerly in that part of the country many people
carried revolvers, but that now, from apprehension of the blacks, in
consequence of the frequent robberies committed by them, no one ever
thought of moving without his six-shooter.’

Memphis is on a bluff of the Mississippi. How strange does this
juxtaposition of the names of hoar antiquity and of yesterday sound in
the ears of a European! And it will also seem strange to many that this
city, whose name they had never heard mentioned, except as being that
of a great city of the Pharaohs, has already a population of 84,000
inhabitants, and is so well situated that it is destined to become,
under the reign of freedom, one of the largest of the second-class
cities of the Union. A bluff is a river-cliff. It may be either an
old and abandoned one (many miles of such bluffs are to be seen in
the valley of the Platte, at considerable distances from the existing
channel of the river), or it may be one at the foot of which the stream
still runs. To the latter class belongs the bluff on which Memphis is
built. It is of a soft sand, and large spaces of it have been escarped
and graded between the city and the water’s edge, in such a manner as
to enable the traffic to be carried on easily. A great many cotton
bales were standing ready for shipment on the great river steamers. As
these bales were spread out over the quays, occupying in this way much
space, they suggested the idea of a great deal of traffic. One might
perhaps have counted a thousand of them. But then I remembered that the
whole of them would be but a very sorry cargo for one of the enormous
steamers, the General Robert Lee, or the General Putman, on board of
which I had lately been, and which were the largest vessels, excepting
the Great Eastern, I had ever seen. They had stowage, I understood,
for three thousand bales, and yet as you looked through their gilded
and splendidly furnished saloons, 180 yards in length, and saw how
great was the number of sleeping berths they contained, you would have
supposed they were constructed for passengers only.

[Sidenote: _Emigration Deprecated._]

In this most modern city with most ancient name, there were many fine
shops and good buildings, but little that was continuously good;
unoccupied spaces, or spaces occupied only with poor wooden tenements,
were everywhere interposed. The streets were generally totally uncared
for. This unsightliness and neglect are to be set down to the past, and
not to the present state of things. They are some of the legacies of
slavery.

I found that from Memphis, as from many other places in the South,
a considerable emigration was going on. While I was there names of
intending emigrants were being collected for a settlement in British
Honduras: this however, I believe, was abandoned on account of the
unsuitableness of the climate for white labour. As in their own State
of Tennessee there is so much good land, and so delightful a climate,
it could have been political reasons only that prompted this thought
of leaving their country. For such persons Brazil appears just now
one of the most favourable fields for commencing life anew; as the
government is there offering, at a merely nominal price, in the hills
in the neighbourhood of the capital, land well suited for coffee
plantations, and where the climate is such as to admit of European
labour. This has been done with the especial view of attracting some
part of the emigration from the Southern States. No friend, however,
of the unhappy people of the South would advise them to accept any
offers of the kind. How much more manly would it be, and how much
better would it be financially for themselves, and morally for their
children and descendants, if they are prepared to labour with their own
hands, to do so in their own country, and remain a part of the great
Anglo-Saxon race, with all its rich inheritance of laws, literature,
and traditions, than to cast in their lot with mongrel Portuguese and
Africans!

Among the letters of introduction I carried with me to Memphis was
one to the President of the Memphis and Ohio railway. He had just
returned from a short stay at the Hot Springs Mountain in Arkansas. He
is one of those gentlemen who are doing everything in their power to
resuscitate the South by persuading the people to turn their attention
to the varied and inexhaustible resources they possess within their
own territories. As instances of this he showed me two specimens; one
of a creamy white stone he had lately brought from the Hot Springs
Mountain in Arkansas, and which could cut steel as readily as a file
does soft iron. Of this stone he was having hones and grindstones made,
which would probably be the best things of their kind anywhere to be
had. The other specimen he showed me was that of iron ore from the
Iron Mountain in Alabama. It looked almost like the metal itself. He
said it contained sixty per cent. of iron, and that the Confederates
had made use of it in the late war. This mountain is sixty miles north
of Montgomery, and there is in its neighbourhood plenty of limestone,
and of coal. For this district he expected (as who would not?) a great
future; for not only is the consumption of iron in agriculture every
year increasing, in the form of new machinery as well as tools, of
which the South now stands greatly in need, but the place itself,
from its contiguity to several large navigable streams, is admirably
situated for a great manufacturing centre.

[Sidenote: _A Conversation with Two Ministers._]

It is the custom in the American Church for the clergyman of the parish
to spend a great part of every morning in a room annexed to his church.
I always found this room fitted up as his library and study, with a
fire in winter blazing on the hearth, and the minister himself seated
at the table at work. This arrangement has great advantages both for
the clergyman and for his parishioners. He can study, and prepare for
his pulpit, without any interruptions from his children, or from the
ever-recurring little incidents of domestic affairs, to which, had
he been in his own house, he would have been expected to give some
attention; and his parishioners are more likely to call upon him in
this room, knowing that he is there for the very purpose of seeing
them, and that they shall not be disturbing anyone by their visit.

Having been requested to call on a clergyman of the place, I found him
in such a room as I have just been describing, in company with another
clergyman of the neighbourhood. Of course the conversation turned on
church affairs. They told me that there were five Episcopal churches in
the city; that the Episcopal church was not so active in the States of
Mississippi and Louisiana as elsewhere in the Union. That the church
of Rome was, in that part of the country, looking very far ahead, and
buying large tracts of land, and founding educational establishments;
that the Germans and Irish did not leave its communion. That church
partisanship was a strong feeling in America; to take for instance
our own church, there were everywhere men who were not members, that
is communicants, but yet considered themselves as belonging to the
Episcopal church, who would fight for every stitch in the surplice,
and every letter in the Prayer-book. And that it was so in all the
other churches. Much interest, they said, was taken in the ritualistic
question, because it was becoming generally felt that our service
is deficient in appeals to the senses; and that it wants variety
and animation. That in the American church, though there is no canon
forbidding _ex tempore_ preaching, there is one which imposes on the
clergyman the necessity of writing every sermon he preaches. The
object of this canon is to enable the bishop to judge of the orthodoxy
of any statements in the sermon with which the congregation may have
been dissatisfied. This was thought necessary in consequence of the
sensitiveness of some congregations, and the tendency in all American
churches to lapse into some ‘ism’ or ‘ology.’ They told me that in
some of the nascent States, as for instance in Idaho, the church was
stronger than any other religious body. In this territory (I believe it
is still in that embryonic condition), there is not a town or village
without an Episcopal church. This has been brought about by sending out
missionary bishops to plant the church in these new territories. The
missionary bishop of Idaho, Dr. Clarkson, is one of the most active and
successful of this new order. As this plan has succeeded so well, it is
much to be regretted that it was not attempted long ago.

[Sidenote: _Going to Church 150 Miles off._]

Americans are great travellers. It almost appears as if there was
something in the air of America which makes one think lightly of
distances, however great. I heard a lady at Washington talking of
starting in a few days for California—a journey of more than five
thousand miles—as if it involved no more than a journey from London
to Edinburgh. I met another lady at a dinner table at New Orleans who
had only that day arrived from New York, a distance of nearly fifteen
hundred miles; and I entered Denver with two ladies who had been
travelling continuously for about two thousand miles each—one from some
New England town, and the other from New York. But I was never made so
sensible of an American’s disregard of distance, and of the slightness
of the provocation needed for inducing him to undertake a journey, as I
was by an invitation I received from a gentleman to accompany him one
hundred and fifty miles out, and of course as many back, merely to hear
a preacher he thought well of, and who he understood would be only at
that distance from Memphis on Sunday. Now this gentleman was a lawyer
who had come all the distance from Detroit to Memphis, on the previous
day, on some matter of business, and would have to start on his return
on Monday evening; and this was the way in which he spent the Sunday
that intervened between two such long journeys, adding three hundred
miles to what anyone but an American would have thought was already a
great deal too much travelling.

It is a commonly received opinion, though perhaps more largely
entertained by authors than by their readers, that the ever-increasing
luxury of the present day has done much to weaken the warlike virtues.
This opinion, I believe, is exactly the opposite of the truth, and
is merely the echo of the opinion of those writers of ancient Rome
who made and bequeathed to us a thoroughly mistaken diagnosis of the
diseases and symptoms of the body politic of their own decaying empire.
Our own late wars, but above everything of the kind in modern or
ancient times, the late great American war, show how entirely false is
this opinion. Never was a war before carried on upon so great a scale,
in proportion to the population of the communities engaged in it;
never was a war more deadly; and never before was a war so thoroughly
voluntary in the cases of so large a majority of the common rank and
file of the combatants. The history of the 7th New York Volunteers,
a regiment of gentlemen who went out, at the beginning of the war,
of their own free will, and went through the whole of it with all
its hardships, sufferings, and deadliness, would alone disprove this
opinion. The hundreds of thousands of men who in the North left their
countinghouses, their farms, and their drawing-rooms, to risk health,
and limb, and life for an idea, are just so many hundreds of thousands
of arguments against it. And in some respects the argument from the
South is still stronger, for there a still larger proportion of the
people went to greater hardships, more cruel wants and sufferings,
and to a deadlier warfare, inasmuch as the same regiments had more
frequently to meet the enemy. In every family I visited in the South
I heard tales of suffering and of heroism. I will only repeat one,
because it shows what a lady even can do and bear in these luxurious
times. A Mrs. Read, while assisting her husband at the siege of
Vicksburg, had her right arm so shattered by a shell that immediate
amputation was necessary. It was during the night, but she would not
have anyone called off from other work to do for her what she was still
capable of doing for herself; she therefore held with her left hand the
lamp which lighted the surgeon to amputate her shattered right arm.

[Sidenote: _Eden._]

I arrived at Cairo by steamer at three o’clock in the morning. It
was a dark and gusty winter night. The rain was falling heavily. At
the landing place there was not a light, not a conveyance, not a
porter, not a negro even to direct us the way to the hotel. Self-help
was the only kind of help any of the passengers got that night. As I
scrambled up the slippery Levee, and then waded through the mud to the
hotel distant about a quarter of a mile, I congratulated myself on my
having sent on all my heavy luggage in advance, so that I had nothing
with me but a hat-box and a hand-bag. But these impediments were more
than enough for the occasion. As I struggled on I thought that if the
author of ‘Martin Chuzzlewit,’ who was then giving readings in America,
should revisit his Eden under such circumstances, he would not feel
dissatisfied with the kind of immortality he had conferred upon it.

The stream of passengers at last reached the hotel. There was no want
of light here. This had been our beacon, and we felt that we had made
the harbour. It was a large red-brick building, with a large hall,
and a large stove, red-hot, in the midst of it. I went straight to
the clerk’s counter, and entered my name in the folio guests’-book. I
was among the first to do this, that I might secure a good room. No
sooner, however, had I gone through this preliminary than the manager
turned to me, and announced that the house could not allow me a room to
myself that night, but that I must take one jointly with the gentleman
who had registered his name before me. I hardly took in the speaker’s
meaning, for this was the first occasion of my life when the idea of
occupying a bed-room with another man had been suggested to me. I
suppose I was so taken by surprise that I remained silent when I ought
to have spoken, for I was next addressed by the gentleman himself
with whom it was proposed I should share the bed-room. ‘Well, sir,’
he said, ‘what do you intend to do? It is now past three; and if you
don’t accept this gentleman’s offer, you will have to go out again
into the street.’ Having said this he took the key from the clerk,
and turning to an attendant, told him to show the way to the room. I
rather followed than accompanied him, thinking over, as I went along,
what I had read of Cairo when, fifteen or twenty years ago, it was a
nest of rowdies, robbers, gamblers, and cut-throats, floating upon
a fever-and-ague-haunted swamp. I began to be somewhat reassured by
the appearance and bearing of my companion. He was a clean-limbed and
remarkably handsome man, apparently turned of forty. His moustache
and beard were trimmed in the French style, and his bearing was
frank and soldierly. On the other side, however, I observed that he
had no luggage whatever. At last the door was reached and opened.
The attendant entered to light the gas. While he was doing this my
companion crossed the room. In crossing it he took off his coat, and
kicked off his boots, and walked ‘slick’ into bed. This was done
quietly and deliberately, but in less time than it took to light the
gas. I felt that I was becoming uncertain as to the reality of things.
Was I at Drury Lane, looking on at the transformations of a pantomime?
or was I dreaming that I was at Cairo?

[Sidenote: _A Bed-room Companion._]

As the balance of probability did not appear to be in favour of either
of these suppositions, I took off my boots, and placed them on the
outside of the door. As I closed the door a voice came to me from the
bed at the further side of the room. Its tone was manly and friendly:
‘Sir,’ it said, ‘if that is the only pair of boots you have with you’
(it was so; for I had sent my luggage on to St. Louis), ‘I would advise
you to keep them inside the room, and have them cleaned on your feet
in the morning. The last time I was here I put mine outside the door,
and never saw them again; and so I had to go barefooted till I could
get another pair.’ I thanked the speaker for his advice, and acted
upon it. My next care was to provide for the safety of my watch and
pocket-book, which contained three hundred dollars in greenbacks. This
I did by putting them into the pocket where I had my handkerchief,
which I then took out of my pocket, as if there was nothing in it (but
the watch and pocket-book were in it), and placed it under my pillow. I
have no doubt but that my companion saw through what I was doing, for
he now addressed me a second time. ‘Before you go to sleep, I suppose
you would like to know who is in the room with you; and yet I hardly
know how to describe myself. For the last four or five years I have
been on this side the mountains. For the fifteen years before that I
had been in California; and I began life in the old States as a lawyer.
In the early days of California, I went out as one of a company for
digging and mining. There were seven of us, and five of the seven were
lawyers. I came over the mountains to help the North in putting down
the rebellion. I made a great heap of money in California, and I have
lost a great heap in bad speculations since I have been over here. But
I have got a scheme on its legs by which I hope to make again as much
as I have lost. That, sir, is what I am—and I wish you good night. My
name is——’ I could not catch the word, but I afterwards ascertained it,
and found that my first bed-room companion added modesty to his other
merits, and had not told me how great a man he was in his own State.

It happened the next day that no train started for the North till
half-past four in the afternoon; and as the rain of the previous night
had turned to heavy driving sleet, I congratulated myself on the
accident, although it appeared so disagreeable at the time, to which
I was indebted for the acquaintance of the Californian. He had known
California, he said, from the first influx of gold hunters. The rogues
and desperadoes of all that part of the world were collected there; but
there was some good stuff that came in at the same time. Society would
have been completely turned upside down, and no decent man could have
remained in the place, if it had not been for Lynch law and the use of
the pistol. These two things set everything quite right in five years,
in a way in which no other kind of law, supported by all the churches
and all the teachers in the world, could have done it in fifty years.
And now the State is as orderly a community as there is on the face of
the earth. After the roughness of many years of Californian life, in
the early days of the State, he found the hardships of the late war
mere _bagatelles_. The war seemed to him only like an exciting pastime.

[Sidenote: _How the Site of Eden was Created._]

The capacity of Eden, for offering a field for such talents as those
of Mr. Mark Tapley, was very much diminished during the late war;
for being at the junction of the Ohio with the Mississippi (the Ohio
itself, not far above this point, is joined by three large streams),
it became a very important military station. But it was necessary to
create a site for a town, for the locality itself supplied nothing
of the kind. This was done by raising a levee, forty feet high, and
then, behind this, making streets in the form of embankments at
right angles to the levee, these streets again being intersected by
other embankments parallel to the levee. The whole space that was
reclaimed was thus divided by these embankments into hollow squares,
each of which is intended for a block of buildings. At present very
few of these blocks have been raised, but the streets—that is, the
embankments, with in some instances planked _trottoirs_ at their
sides—are finished. If the water should ever rise up through the
ground, or the storm-water flow into the cellars and underground parts
of the houses, it will be necessary to pump it out, for there can be
no drainage in such a place. So in America, where no difficulties are
recognised, are towns built in swamps.

One cannot help speculating on what will be the amount of inducement
required for getting people to try to live and carry on business at
this city in the swamp, for the fact that the traffic of the valleys
of the Ohio and Mississippi join and diverge here will ensure its
becoming rich and populous. And what will be the manners and customs
of the place? Will it be merely that people living here will call for
more whisky toddy and sherry cobblers, smoke more cigars, and play
more games of billiards than they would elsewhere? How far will the
beneficent railway go towards redressing the wretchedness of the place
by carrying off, for the night, for Sundays, and for holidays, all who
might wish to have their homes on _terra firma_? Democracies are stingy
and do not build beautiful cities in these days; so, however rich it
may become, it is not likely ever to become a Venice.

The train in which I had left Cairo reached a place called Odin at
eleven o’clock at night. We had to wait here for a St. Louis train
till the next morning. This is an instance of what is called, in
American railway phraseology, ‘making bad connexions.’ The gentleman
who registered after me at the chief hotel at Odin happened to be my
Californian acquaintance. Having entered his name, he said to the
manager, pointing to me, ‘This gentleman and I will have the same
bed-room.’ This was meant as a compliment; and I did not now feel as
disinclined to the proposal, particularly as it came from him, as I
had been a few nights before. The clerk, however, told him that the
house was full, and that I was the last person he could accommodate. I
was, upon this, shown to my bed-room, which turned out to be only the
fourth part of a very small apartment containing four beds, three of
which were already tenanted. My English inexperience and prejudices
were still too strong for this, so I sallied out in search of another
hotel. While thus occupied I had time to reflect, that there is not
much more harm in spending the night in a room with three others, than
in spending the day in a railway car with thirty or forty others. At
last, chance conducted me to the same house the Californian had already
reached; and we sat by the stove in the drawing-room, talking together
till the small hours of the morning. There is an unconventional kind
of frankness and manliness that is very pleasing in these Western men,
who have gone through a great deal of rough life and hardship, and
have never, for years together, been out of danger from Indians, or
desperate white men, as sanguinary as Indians, and as little troubled
with scruples.

[Sidenote: _Be Good to Yourself._]

For the words’ sake I ‘made a note’ of a parting expression I heard
used by a rough-looking and ill-clad ostler, who it appeared was not
very comfortably assured of his friend’s motives for leaving him to
go to one of the most rowdy places in the Union. His friend had taken
his place on the roof of the coach, which was in the act of starting,
when he waved his hand to him, saying at the same time with an enviable
neatness, that conveyed both his kindly feelings and his misgivings,
‘Tom, be good to yourself.’




CHAPTER XI

 MISSISSIPPI FROZEN OVER AT ST. LOUIS—WHY THE BRIDGE AT ST. LOUIS IS
 BUILT BY CHICAGO MEN—GENERAL SHERMAN—IDEAS ABOUT EDUCATION AT ST.
 LOUIS—LIBERAL BEQUESTS FOR EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES—HOW NEW ENGLANDISM
 LEAVENS THE WHOLE LUMP—THE GERMAN INVASION WILL NOT GERMANISE
 AMERICA—ST. LOUIS—ITS RAPID GROWTH—ITS CHURCH ARCHITECTURE—AN IDEA
 ON MENTAL CULTURE FROM THE WEST BANK OF THE MISSISSIPPI—A THOUGHT
 SUGGESTED BY HEARING THE SKATERS ON THE MISSISSIPPI TALKING ENGLISH.


On leaving Odin I saw the prairie for the first time. It was a sea of
rich level land, and was here everywhere under cultivation. Since I
had left Washington, I had not till now seen cultivation and houses
everywhere around me, as far as the eye could reach. After some hours
we came to undulating land where coal-mining was being carried on.
There were several pits alongside of the rail. The seam of coal, I
was told, is seven feet thick. At ten o’clock we reached East St.
Louis. Only a few days ago I had been among the oranges, bananas, and
sugar-canes; and now I looked upon the mighty Mississippi, solidly
frozen from shore to shore, and saw multitudes of persons crossing and
recrossing on the ice. So great is the range of climate in this vast
country, and yet, by the aid of steam, so near to each other are the
two extremes!

[Sidenote: _An Advantage of Youth._]

At St. Louis, the Mississippi is crossed by very powerful steam
ferries, and a passage across the river has for this purpose to be kept
open and free from ice. The Bluff has been escarped to enable vehicles
to get down to the water-side. The crush and crowd were very great, and
to increase the difficulty of getting down, the face of the descent was
at that time coated thickly with ice. I saw two loaded waggons capsize,
and the coach I was in at one time began to slip, and we were only
saved by the skill of the driver. The ferry boat took over more than a
dozen coaches and waggons each trip, many of them having four horses.
The city of St. Louis is on the further or western bank, and all the
traffic of the city and of the vast region beyond it crosses at this
ferry. It will not, however, be needed much longer, for the foundations
are now being laid for a bridge, which, like that at Niagara, will
carry foot-passengers and all kinds of horse-drawn vehicles, as well
as the railway trains. It is a strange thing that this bridge is being
built, not by the people of St. Louis itself, but by capital advanced
by Chicago men. The reason is not far to seek. St. Louis, regarded as
a considerable place, is ten or fifteen years older than Chicago. The
moneyed men therefore at St. Louis are getting into years, and so have
become cautious, and indisposed to try new investments. The Chicago men
are still young: the enterprise of youth in them is not yet exhausted;
and so they are ready to entertain, and even to accept, new ideas; and
a proposal, however grand, or novel, or costly it may be, is not on
these accounts appalling to them. In America, where everything is ever
moving and changing, an elderly man is unfit for business.

At St. Louis I became acquainted with General Sherman. I mention this
because it may be interesting to hear what were one’s impressions of
the man who conceived and executed one of the boldest and most arduous
military achievements of modern times—that of marching his army down
through the heart of the Southern States to Charleston and Savannah. He
is tall and thin, without an ounce of flesh to spare. He gives you the
idea of a man who is ready at any moment to tax his mental and bodily
powers to any amount possible for human nature, and that they would
respond to the demands made upon them without flagging, only that his
frame would become more and more fleshless and wiry. If you had not
known that he was General Sherman, still you would have thought him
one of the kindliest and friendliest men you had ever met. His first
questions were, whether there was anything he could do for me? any
letters he could write for me to persons in St. Louis or Missouri? any
information on any subject that it was in his power to give me? The
letters of introduction he supplied me with he wrote with his own hand.
He interested himself about my intended excursion to the Plains and
Rocky Mountains, going over the route with me, and advising me what to
see and what to do, and bid me not to hesitate about applying to him
for anything I wanted that he could do for me. His physiognomy agrees
with his military life in indicating that he is a man of unflinching
determination. His first thought on undertaking anything appears to
be, as it was with our Iron Duke, to master thoroughly all the details
of the subject, to ascertain what will be wanted down to the minutest
particular, and to provide for everything.

[Sidenote: _Educational Ideas at St. Louis._]

As the superintendent of schools at St. Louis, to whom I had a letter
from Washington, was confined to his house by illness, I took a letter
from General Sherman to the president of an institution at St. Louis
that goes by the name of the ‘Washington University.’ It is not a
university in our sense of the word, but an institution for working
connectedly the different educational resources of the place, beginning
with the elementary schools, and passing up through grammar and high
schools to a kind of polytechnic institution, in which arts rather
than sciences are taught, the arts in truth being little more than
the principles and practice of different trades and occupations. This
seems to us a low view to take of education and of a university. But
it is what is first wanted in a new country, where every man has to
work for his bread, and everything has to be done. Higher culture is
not for the existing, but for future generations. So think the people
who manage this institution. And so think the people for whose benefit
the institution has been established, except that they have little or
no idea at all, as yet, of the ‘higher culture.’ They are beginning
to be intolerant even of the time and money spent in teaching law and
medicine, and of the position assigned to lawyers and physicians. It
was in this spirit that a gentleman said to me, on the prairie between
Chicago and Omaha, ‘What we want, sir, in this great country, is fewer
graduates of law and medicine, and more graduates of the machine shop
and agricultural college.’

This Washington University has had 800,000 dollars presented and
bequeathed to it by citizens of St. Louis in the last eleven years; and
as the war, and the collapse that followed the war, cover more than
half of this period, the sum appears very considerable. This is in the
spirit, and it is a very common spirit in America, of the times when
our own colleges and schools were founded.

The president told me that he came from New England to settle at St.
Louis thirty years ago. He rode all the way. At that time the country
was so little settled that he would ride by compass a whole day without
seeing a log hut or a human being. He brought with him to St. Louis the
ideas and the traditions of New England. His son had, following the
example of his father, moved on westward. He had crossed the mountains
and settled in Oregon, on the Pacific coast. His son had been brought
up at St. Louis in the ideas and traditions of New England, and had
taken them with him. In this way it is that the New England element,
which is a distinct character, is kept up and propagated throughout the
whole West. Other emigrants bring with them nothing of so tough and
perdurable a nature; New Englandism therefore must spread till it has
leavened the whole lump.

[Sidenote: _America will not be Germanised._]

In the West one is frequently confronted by the question, What will be
the effect on the Americans of the future of the vast hordes of Germans
which yearly invade and settle in the country? Whole districts are
occupied by them, beginning in Pennsylvania, to the exclusion of the
English language. In the Western towns you will see street after street
in which half, or more than half, the names are German. They have
their own hotels, their own newspapers, their own theatres. It seems a
greater invasion than that of the Roman Empire by their fathers. That
overthrew the empire, and for a time disorganised society; it, however,
did not extend the language of the Fatherland into Italy, Spain, or
France. But here is a continuous stream of between 200,000 and 300,000,
every year coming, not with sword and torch to slay and to burn, or to
perish themselves, but with the axe and the plough to clear away the
forest, and to cultivate the soil. Every one that comes is taken up
into that entity which will be the America of the future. What then
will be the effect? Many Americans fear that it will not be good.
‘Because,’ say they, ‘the Germans are deficient in spirituality.’ That
is the word they use. ‘They have no religious devotion: this element
appears to have been left out of their composition.’

I am disposed to think that they will have very little power to modify
the future character of the nation. First, because they are all
learning, and must all learn, the English language, which cannot but
become their mother tongue. This being the case, they must imbibe the
ideas current in America in that language; and so German ideas will
fade away and die out of their minds.

Another reason I have for my opinion is, that the conflict is between
Germanism and New Englandism; and it is carried on upon what may be
regarded as the soil of New England. But New Englandism is a far
tougher plant, and one of far more vigorous growth than Germanism,
especially when transplanted to another world, very unlike that of the
Rhine and of the Danube. For these reasons I believe that the German
invasion will be absorbed and lost in America. It will not Germanise
the Americans, but will itself be Americanised.

This applies to ideas, not to temperament, which is a matter of blood
and nerves; and it is possible that the highly excitable American
temperament may be somewhat calmed by the phlegm of Germany. But if
this effect be produced, we can hardly expect that it will be lasting,
for in time America will change the temperament of the German, just as
it has changed the temperament of the Anglo-Saxon.

St. Louis is a large and well-built city of about 280,000 inhabitants.
In the year 1836 it was only a French village of about 3,000 souls,
almost all of whom were Canadians and Canadian half-breeds. In those
days the wild Indian was close upon it. Now the French and the Indians
are both alike obliterated, and railways reach between five and six
hundred miles beyond it. It contains many churches, some of which are
built in very good taste and style. I never saw red brick anywhere else
used so pleasingly and effectively in pointed architecture, as in the
spire of one of the churches in this city. I was also much struck with
a stone church, the tower of which was not yet completed. Each window
in the side aisles had a second window over it, in the form of a kind
of window head or marigold. The main aisle had clerestory windows.
All the windows throughout were filled with stained glass. This fine
church belonged to the Episcopal communion. There are six Episcopal
congregations in St. Louis. I here became acquainted with a clergyman
who had just returned from a long tour through Europe and the East. It
was strange, on the west bank of the Mississippi, on a spot where red
men had sold their furs, and smoked their pipes, in the memory of the
speaker himself, to hear expressed the opinion, ‘that a man of culture
and thought had not completed his education till he had seen with his
own eyes the scenes in which the great events of man’s past history had
been enacted.’

[Sidenote: _Thoughts from the Mississippi._]

While crossing the Mississippi on the ice, I could not hear unmoved the
shoals of skaters cheering, and shouting, and talking merrily in good
English, just as if it were all on the Serpentine in the Park; and I
thought to myself that that small piece of water in the midst of London
does not belong more completely to the English race than the Father of
Waters himself does now, and must for ever.




CHAPTER XII.

 INSTANCE OF AMERICAN KINDLINESS—RED-SKINS AND HALF-BREEDS ON THE
 RAILS—CINCINNATI AND ITS INHABITANTS—WHAT MAY BE MADE OF PIGS—THE
 INFLUENCE OF ITS PORK CROP—MACHINERY FOR KILLING AND CURING—IMPROVING
 EFFECT AMERICAN EQUALITY HAS ON THE HIGHEST AND LOWEST CLASS—CHURCHES
 ONLY UNPROSAIC BUILDINGS IN AMERICAN TOWNS—SCHOOLS—MERITS OF
 PHILADELPHIAN STYLE OF CITY-BUILDING NOT OBVIOUS—IN WHAT IT
 CONSISTS—AMERICA HAS BUT ONE CITY—NO. 24, G STREET, CORNER OF 25TH
 STREET.


On leaving St. Louis for Cincinnati, I took the evening train, because,
as far as Odin, the ground was the same I had lately passed over. On
entering the carriage I met with an instance of American kindliness
I should be sorry to have to pass unnoticed. When I applied for a
sleeping berth, I found that they were all engaged except some on the
upper tier. As the heated air accumulates against the roof, these upper
berths are generally too warm; besides that, there is some difficulty
in getting in and out of them. This difficulty would have been very
considerably increased in my case, as I happened just at that time to
be obliged to carry my arm in a sling. An American gentleman, and, as
I afterwards found, a very well-known man in Chicago, observing this,
came up to me, and insisted on my taking his lower berth, and letting
him have in exchange my upper one. While at Chicago, I was laid under
further obligation to this gentleman, which I must advert to when I
reach that place. He was one of those who, during the late war, gave
up their business, and left their comfortable houses for the tented
field, that they might help to save their country from disruption; and
he had had the good fortune to accompany Sherman in his memorable march
through the South.

[Sidenote: _What may be made of Pigs._]

There were two red-skins ‘on board’ this sleeping car, on their way to
Washington to transact the business of their tribe. They were tall,
bony men, but their complexion was not of so dark a copper colour as
I had expected. Their features were coarse and stolid, their only
expression being just that of the obstinate tenacity of purpose, and of
the power of endurance with which history credits their race. They were
accompanied by two half-breeds, who appeared a great improvement on the
pure stock. These latter played at cards hour after hour, and, when not
so employed, sang together Heber’s ‘Missionary Hymn’ and ‘Three Blind
Mice’ alternately, equally unconscious of the poetry and sentiments of
the one, and of the inanity of the other.

Everyone has heard of the Metropolis of Pigs. And it is rightly so
called, for the greatness of Cincinnati is founded on cured pigs, in a
far greater degree than that of Holland was on pickled herrings. Here
are more than 200,000 souls maintained in life by breeding, fattening,
killing, salting, packing, and exporting incredible millions of pigs.
The 200,000 human beings are only 200,000,000 pigs in another form.
The old and the young, the schools and the churches, the politicians
and the men of science of this great city, are all created out of pig.
Take away the pigs, and they all disappear; double the pigs, and they
all are doubled.

And the influence of the pigs of Cincinnati is felt all over the world.
When an East Anglian farmer sells his improved Essex or Suffolk hog,
the price of its bacon is affected by the greater or less number of its
brethren who grunted their last at Cincinnati during the previous year,
or, as the Cincinnatians themselves would say, on the amount of the
previous year’s ‘pork crop.’

Of course, where so many pigs have to be disposed of, one would expect
to find in America some time-and-labour-saving machinery; and I was
told that, if I went into any of the great factories—which, however, I
did not do—I might see machinery in operation, by the aid of which a
stream of pigs, that walked into the factory at the front door, alive
and grunting, was made to issue, a few minutes afterwards, at the
opposite door, ready packed for exportation in the three forms of ham,
bacon, and lard; each in his passage through the building having been
stabbed in the throat, scraped, eviscerated, jointed, and injected with
bacon or ham-curing liquor, all by machinery, and with the regularity
of clockwork.

[Sidenote: _Some Effects of American Democracy._]

One of the most marked peculiarities of American society is the
total absence of all classes higher than those of the merchant and
professional man. One sees the working of this in many different ways.
For instance, it evidently elevates the tone and character of the
classes which thus find themselves at the head of the scale. It gives
them a dignity and a bearing they would not otherwise possess. If
there is no one higher in society than a retail shop-keeper, then by
the force of his position he becomes brave and liberal, and his ideas
become enlarged. I observed this at Denver, where there is no higher
class. And I think the same observation would be made by any one who
would go so far to judge for himself. There are good effects which the
American system has upon those also who are most humbly placed. As they
feel that they are theoretically, and in some respects practically,
equal to those who are even the best placed in society, they endeavour
not to disgrace or altogether to fall short of their position. This
is a strong stimulus among them to education and self-improvement.
It is what has suggested the efforts of many who have risen in life,
and sustained them through many long years of patient industry and
laborious enterprise. I have no reason to believe a word of all that I
ever heard of the offensive self-assertion and obtrusive incivility of
this class, for I never myself suffered from, or witnessed, anything
of the kind. Where an Englishman is the complainant, I should be
disposed to think that, in most cases, he had provoked the treatment
he complains of, for no people are more careful about giving offence
than Americans. This carefulness is taught in their schools, and is a
tradition of American society, coming down from the time when, among an
excitable people, the use of the pistol had always been simultaneous
with the offence.

Another effect of the want in America of what we in Europe regard as
the Corinthian capital of society, is the almost entire absence of the
literary element. Not that the Americans have no writers or readers;
they have plenty of the former, and are a nation of the latter. But
this leaves very little trace on American society, because they have no
class whose only real work in life is intellectual. The chief source
of supply for the literary element is, with us, that vast number of
persons, constituting quite an order in the state, who live upon the
rent of the land, associated with whom is perhaps a still greater
number of families who live more or less on interest and dividends,
that is, on realised personalty. The members of this class can only
distinguish themselves in life by the exercise of intellectual powers.
They have abundant leisure, and every appliance at their command for
intellectual culture. Multitudes of them, it is true, never rise to
any useful conception of the advantages and requirements of their
position; still this, and this only, is what they are called to;
and we cannot complain that their work is on the whole done badly.
As a class they are highly educated. From them come almost all our
statesmen, and a large proportion of our literary and scientific men.
Their culture it is that with us gives to society its tone and colour.
This intellectualising element is completely wanting in America. The
effects of its absence are by the European never unfelt for a moment.
He is always conscious that there are no statesmen, though plenty
of politicians, no literary men, though plenty of writers, and no
intellectual class, though much has been done successfully to cultivate
intellect.

[Sidenote: _Schools._]

As was my custom wherever I went, I asked permission to visit and
inspect some of the schools of this place. The superintendent of
schools for Cincinnati was so good as to take me over the largest
graded school in the city. We spent in it three hours. There were
present about 600 children. The school was divided into six grades. In
New York and most other places two of the grades would have belonged to
the Grammar School. We began at the bottom and worked up to the top.
They teach reading, as is generally now done in America, phonetically.
This they think an easier method. They are not at all ambitious in
their reading books, because they do not aim at conveying knowledge of
things through the medium of reading lessons, but content themselves
with creating the habit of reading correctly, and with attention to the
meaning of what is read; and this is more likely to be secured, if the
book consists of little interesting stories, than would be the case if
it contained solid information. What in the upper grades they write
to-day, is what they remember of an object lesson given on the previous
day. This trains them to remember, to think, and to compose. There is
no writing from copies, which children generally get through as quickly
as they can, without any attention or thought. Singing is carefully
taught, and so is elementary drawing, particularly in connection with
the construction of maps. They begin the study of Geography, with the
geography of the school-room, which is the North, the East, the South,
and the West side: and then they go on to what is beyond. The geography
of the United States is taught carefully. It often struck me in America
that the geography of the rest of the world was almost ignored. In
these schools the reading was very good, and from the readiness and
correctness of their answers, it was evident that they were in the
habit of attending to what they were reading, and that they completely
mastered its meaning. It is not to be expected that children, when they
leave school, will keep up their reading, if they have not been taught
to read with facility, and so far to understand what they read as to
take an interest in it.

The key to the success of these schools, and of so many other city
schools in America, is that they are graded, and that each grade has a
room and teacher exclusively to itself. The whole time of the teacher
is devoted to one class. No member, therefore, of the class can ever
during school hours be idle. This system, too, naturally employs more
largely than any other the oral method of conveying instruction. The
teacher stands up before the class, and teaches it. The eye and the
ear are always busy. There is no drowsiness, no whispering, no poring
over books, or pretending to be poring over them. All the teachers
in this school, excepting one, were women. The superintendent of the
whole school appeared to attend equally to all the classes, and to be
responsible for the state of each. Boys and girls are taught together
in all grades except the highest. The district in which this fine
school is situated is inhabited chiefly by German Jews, and more than
half the 600 pupils were children of such parents. The Roman Catholic
children were only six or seven per cent. of the whole. In the State of
Ohio they do not, as is done in the State of New York, allow the Roman
Catholics a part of the school rate for the maintenance of separate
schools. If they wish to bring up their children in schools of their
own, of course they are at liberty to do so, but they must pay for such
schools themselves.

[Sidenote: _America has but One City._]

I observed at Cincinnati, and in some other cities, that the American
Jews affect in their synagogues a Moorish style of architecture. As
American cities can have no historical buildings, there is nothing in
them to counteract the prose of commerce, and of the American method
of laying out cities, except the churches. And as many of them (the
practice being general among all the denominations) are embellished
with towers or spires, their redeeming effect on the appearance of the
town is very considerable.

As I am on the subject of American towns, I trust that my friends in
that part of the world will excuse me for never having been persuaded
by them to fall into ecstacies at the contemplation of the plan of
Philadelphia, which they point to with feelings of enthusiasm, as the
very perfection of taste and judgment in the art of building cities.
There is, however, as far as I could see, nothing in Philadelphia which
is not also in St. Louis and Cincinnati, and a hundred other cities in
embryo, or in adolescence. The three cities whose names I have just
mentioned are, saving their reverence, as like one another as three
peas. They have no main street, but a number of parallel streets at
equal distances from each other. These are numbered, first, second,
third, &c. Another set of streets, again, exactly parallel to each
other, cut the first at right angles. This second set of streets, in
the three cities I have named, are called after different trees: Birch,
Elm, Hickory, &c. This is everything. It is the very democracy of
houses; for all the streets and blocks are equal. No one is larger, or
wider, or in anyway better than another.

Of course the result of this must be that there is not a particle of
difference between one town and another, all having been cast in the
same mould. It would be laughable, were it not tiresome, to have not
a thousand cities in America, but one city reproduced over and over
again, wherever you go. St. Louis and Cincinnati are about the same
size, and have much the same kind of site, and I believe that if a man
who had spent a week in each of these cities, were a month afterwards
carried blindfold into one of them, and set down in the middle of the
town, he would be unable to say in which of the two he was. I know no
two things that are so like each other, except it be two farms on the
Prairie, where every farm is just the fac-simile of every other farm;
so that it is really impossible to guess how one living on the Prairie,
unless he developes a new sense to meet the circumstances he is placed
in, can ever distinguish his own home.

[Sidenote: _No. 24, G St., Corner of 25th St._]

I venture to think that the Americans are under another mistake about
their towns; they suppose that their method of parallel streets, not
named but enumerated and lettered, is a great help to the memory, and
facilitates very much the finding of any house one is in search of.
Never did fallible mortals entertain so erroneous an idea. Instead of
a name, Rivoli, or Cheapside, which readily fixes itself in the mind
you have to remember a figure and a letter; and as neither figures nor
letters suggest ideas, the thing is impossible. In truth, you have to
remember two figures and a letter. For instance No 24, G Street, corner
of 25th Street. There is no faculty in the human mind which enables one
to retain this direction. In five minutes all certainty is lost as to
whether it was G or E, 25th or 26th—perhaps it was C, perhaps it was
36th.

In fact, the Americans have but one town, and in the nomenclature of
the streets of this one town they have done everything the perverse
ingenuity of man could desire to render it confusing.




CHAPTER XIII.

 THE VALLEY OF THE OHIO—MUCH OF THE UNITED STATES WILL PRODUCE
 WINE—ILLINOIS AT NIGHT—FIRST VIEW OF LAKE MICHIGAN—CHICAGO—A SIGN OF
 OUTWARD RELIGION—‘SMALL-POX HERE’—FIRE ALARM—LIBERALITY OF CHICAGO
 MERCHANTS—THE DOLLAR NOT ALL IN ALL—A CHURCH LIGHTED FROM THE ROOF—A
 HANDSOME AMERICAN—AMERICA HAS DEVELOPED A NEW TYPE OF FEATURES—CHICAGO
 SCHOOLS—AN EXCEPTION TO THE AMERICAN WAY OF DENOUNCING THE OFFICIAL
 CLASS—CHICAGO SUNDAY SCHOOLS—PROGRAMME OF ONE I ATTENDED—EXCELLENCE
 OF WATER AT CHICAGO—HOW SUPPLIED—LIFTING UP THE CITY—POST OFFICE
 ARRANGEMENTS—A DISADVANTAGE OF FREQUENT CHANGE OF CLERKS—AMERICANS ON
 ARISTOCRACY—HOW THE GERMANS, THE MASSES OF THE PEOPLE, AND THE UPPER
 CLASS FEEL TOWARDS IT.


The valley of the Ohio pleased me—all things considered—more than any
other district I saw in the United States. The land was generally very
fertile, and much diversified with riverside levels and contiguous
hills; with cultivated land, and woodland; with apple and peach
orchards, and with wheat and maize. Its most novel feature was the
space devoted to the culture of the vine.

[Sidenote: _Lake Michigan._]

In many parts of the Union, as in this State, California, and several
others, a great deal of wine is already made; and the planting of
vineyards is yearly extending. I tasted two wines, sparkling Catawba,
and a red Californian wine, which are really good now, and which no
doubt in course of time will become still better. The former was a
little too sweet; but that is a fault, if it be regarded as a fault
in America, which can easily be remedied by carrying the process of
fermentation a little further. There is every prospect of a larger
proportion of America, than of Europe, producing wine; in that case
the same proportion of its inhabitants will become a wine, and not a
beer, or spirit-drinking population. In Europe we attribute certain
differences of national character to this difference in the beverage of
a people. It appears as if, in this highly-favoured region, upon which
Nature has heaped all her gifts, that nothing in the way of climate,
occupation, or even food, which can diversify life and character, will
be wanting. America will contain within herself all that other people,
less bountifully provided, have to seek all over the world.

On passing through almost any part of Illinois after sunset, there are
so many lights seen in every direction, glancing from the innumerable
farm houses, that I could hardly help thinking, at one time, that the
train was entering a large town, while at another, I was reminded of
the gleaming on all sides from the shutterless windows of a scattered
English village, during the first hour or two of darkness. And this is
the way in which all these fertile North-western States are filling up.

On arriving at Chicago, my first thought was to see the Lake, one of
the great fresh-water seas I had been reading of, since I was a boy. I
was now within a few paces of it, and was only prevented by the houses
from looking upon it. I had driven to the Sherman House, a large hotel
on one side of the square in the centre of which stands the City Hall;
and I had been told that the only good view of the city, and of the
Lake, was to be had from the gallery round the top of the dome of
this building. It was not long before I ascended the stairs that led
to it; and as I stepped out on the balcony, the boundless blue water,
reflecting the undimmed hazeless sky, and washing up almost to the
foot of the building, and stretching away beyond the horizon, suddenly
burst on the view. It was Lake Michigan. Imagination does much on such
occasions. I felt satisfied. It was not only worth seeing, but it was
worth coming to see.

Here, in these vast reservoirs, is Nature carrying on some of her
hydraulic operations upon the grandest scale in the world. Here, too,
at this very spot, at its southern point, the countless buffalo used
to drink the water of the Lake, and here it was that the red man
was waiting to welcome him; and now the white man is ploughing, and
harvesting, and building cities all around its shores, and its waters
are wafting to this great central depôt the produce of his labours, and
then bearing it away again, to feed the millions of New England and of
the distant seaboard cities, and even to aid the deficient supplies of
Old England and France.

[Sidenote: _Evidence of Outward Religion._]

Chicago well deserves its reputation. Its stores, and private houses
and churches, are good, and would be so considered in any city. Its
stores are in buildings, two floors higher than the shops of Oxford
or Regent Street, as is generally the case in all the large American
cities. They have an air of solidity, and are not entirely devoid of
external decoration. There are suburbs containing many good private
residences, the best of which are to be seen in Michigan Avenue, along
the shores of the Lake. These are built of a cream-coloured stone, and
many of them give one a favourable idea of the architectural taste,
as well as of the wealth, of their inhabitants. From the gallery of
the City Hall I counted twenty-three towers and spires; but this is
very far from giving the number of churches, as perhaps the majority
of them still being incomplete, or only temporary structures, are
without these embellishments. In the central parts of the city, where
all the buildings are good and massive, and the smoke—for here they
burn bituminous coal—has put a complexion upon them something like that
of London, you could never guess that you were standing in a city so
young, that many of its inhabitants, still young themselves, remember
the erection of the first brick house in the place; you would be
more likely to suppose that you were surrounded by the evidences and
appliances of the commercial prosperity of many generations.

On my mentioning to a ‘citizen’ of Chicago the number of the churches I
had counted from the top of the City Hall, ‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘we are a
religious people outwardly.’

In this, one of the youngest cities in the world, I observed some
regulations that would be worthy of adoption elsewhere. For instance,
wherever in the city a case of small-pox occurs, a large yellow sheet
is pasted to the door of the house, announcing in conspicuous letters,
‘Small-pox here.’ I could not but compare this wise regulation with
our carelessness on the same subject at home. This very disease of
small-pox, or scarlet fever, or any other infectious disease, may have
struck down many of the inmates of a house; yet, according to our
custom, it is allowable for the occupiers of the house, if they keep
a shop, to invite customers to enter, and to sell them articles of
dress, or of food, which in some way or other may become vehicles of
infection.

Another very useful arrangement I found in operation here, is that
by which the whole city is instantly informed of the existence of a
fire, and of the locality in which it has burst out. The city is, for
this purpose, divided into districts, each district being known by
its number. In some central and conspicuous place in each, is a box
containing an apparatus by which a bell may be rung in a room at the
City Hall. In this room there are men constantly watching the bells.
As soon as the bell of any district is rung, the watchers reply with
a hurried kind of chime on the large bell of the City Hall, which can
be heard in every part of the city. This is to announce that there is
a fire. There is then a pause of half a minute, after which the number
of the district is struck on the bell. This informs everyone of the
exact locality of the fire. The policeman on duty in each district is
the person whose business it is to go to the box and ring the bell.
In order, however, to save time, it is competent for any respectable
citizen to do this; for the place where the key of the box is kept is
always mentioned on the outside of the box, and the keeper of the key
is ordered to give it up to any respectable applicant. I was surprised
to find how often during the night announcements of fire were made from
the City Hall.

[Sidenote: _The Dollar not all in all._]

A few days before my arrival at Chicago there had been, in the best
part of the city, one of those monster fires which are of such frequent
occurrence in American towns. A fine hall belonging to the Young
Men’s Christian Association, and many of the largest stores in the
city, had been completely destroyed. This gave the merchants of the
place an opportunity for exercising the liberality which is one of
the characteristics of America, and in no part of America exists in a
higher degree than in Chicago. In a few hours after the occurrence,
before the embers had ceased to smoulder, enough had been subscribed to
rebuild the hall of the Young Men’s Christian Association on a larger
scale than that of the one that had been destroyed; and the merchants
of the place had met, and had put down their names for considerable
sums, to form a fund upon which their brother merchants who had been
burnt out by the great fire, and lost their stock in trade, might
draw for as much as was needed for rebuilding, and re-establishing
themselves in business. Repayment was not to be thought of till the
recovery of their affairs conveniently admitted of it.

It is commonly supposed that the Americans are entirely devoted to the
pursuit of the dollar. It is true that they pursue the dollar more
energetically, intelligently, and successfully than any other people,
but no mistake can be greater than that of supposing that they pursue
it exclusively. First there is no other country in the world in which
the political sentiment is so widely diffused, and so deeply felt;
where so much time and thought are devoted to it; where it calls forth
so much hard intellectual work in the forms of writing, reading, and
speaking. And this is true not of one, but of all classes, from the top
to the bottom of society.

Nor is there any other country in which the religious sentiment works
so vigorously and so spontaneously, and is so fruitful in great,
obvious, and ponderable results. And this as well among those who
labour, as among those who elsewhere are supposed to have almost the
monopoly of thinking and feeling.

Again, in no other country do a million persons taken not from a
horizontal, but from a vertical section of society, read so much; and
there can be no surer gauge of the amount of pure mental activity than
the amount of reading. The Americans are a nation of readers, and read
far more than any other nation in the world. And not only do they read
more, but what they read has more effect on them than is the case with
any other people.

In the three great departments then of intellectual activity and
life—politics, religion, and in the use of literature—this people who
are supposed to devote their whole soul to the pursuit of the dollar,
are greatly in advance of ourselves and of all other nations.

But whatever the amount of toil Americans may impose on themselves
in getting money, it is not done with a view to saving. The American
who hoards is a rare exception. They will make a good fight for the
purpose of enlarging their business, and increasing their income. But,
when this increase comes, it is used and not accumulated. All the
world knows that there are no other people who spend so much on their
families and houses, on travelling and entertaining, in hospitality and
in charity.

[Sidenote: _Improved Type of Features._]

On Sunday evening I attended a service at Trinity Church, having been
attracted by the exterior of the building, which is a conspicuous
object from some points in Michigan Avenue. I mention this because
I observed a peculiarity in the means used for lighting it, which
might occasionally be adopted with advantage in London, and large
cities where sites are costly. I suppose the space was so confined by
dwelling houses on the north and south sides, that windows in the walls
of the aisles were inadmissible. This difficulty had been met boldly
by enlarging the clerestory windows, and adding in the roof rows of
quatrefoil skylights, filled with very dark stained glass. I should
have been glad to have seen the effect of this by daylight. Nine tenths
of the congregation I saw in this church that evening were gentlemen,
from which I inferred that the service was intended mainly for the
rougher sex.

What is conventionally regarded by us as the American type of features
is not uncommon on the Eastern seaboard, but is seldom seen in the
West. The clergyman whom I saw officiating in Trinity Church might have
sat for the bust of a Greek philosopher. He had a massive head, with
much refinement about it; a lofty forehead, a straight nose, and a
magnificent beard. He spoke in a manly and soldierly way of what he had
witnessed on the battle-fields of the late war.

A new and completely distinct type of features has been developed
in America. Of all races of men, that from which the Americans are
descended has the greatest mixture and variety of features. We have no
facial type. We have round heads and long heads; low, high, prominent,
and receding foreheads; large jaws and small; our noses are infinite
in multiformity; we have long and short, thick and fine, pug, Roman,
and straight, each in all degrees. In America, however, the whole of
this variety has been lost and obliterated. The descendants of the
most various-featured race of mankind have become one of the most
uniform-featured race in the world. Whatever part of the country you
may be in, you will find the same thing. As a general rule, the native
Americans all have straight noses off straight foreheads, and small
jaws. Their faces have been brought to one type, and that a far more
intellectual one than what we are familiar with in the old country: it
is almost the antipodes of that to which the conventional John Bull
belongs. To be convinced of this, it is only necessary to look at the
features of the passengers in a railway car, or at the Americans one
meets in private houses, or at places of public amusement. The straight
nose and forehead are everywhere the rule. I saw at Richmond a frame
containing the photographs of the fifty Southerners who had most
distinguished themselves in the late war. There was not a single pug,
or short or Roman nose among them. It has been just the same with the
Greeks; whatever race of people has inhabited the soil of Greece, has
assumed the Greek type of feature. The present inhabitants of Greece
are chiefly Bulgarians, but their features are Greek.

[Sidenote: _Schools at Chicago._]

In America this transformation is observable chiefly in those of
Anglo-Saxon descent. The French, both of Canada and Louisiana, retain
their French features. This may give us some clue to the cause which
has acted on our descendants. The French have retained French habits
of life. They have not given in to and adopted the American love
of excitement, love of work, and devotion to business, which never
pause to enjoy life, but are always struggling forward, and doing
something and doing it at high pressure. It is also observable that the
descendants of the easy-going Germans retain their old European type
longer than those who are of Anglo-Saxon parentage.

I was taken over some of the schools of Chicago by the Superintendent
of Schools for the city. Those I saw were chiefly used by the children
of German and Irish parents. They did not appear so quick as the
children of native Americans: the variety, also, of feature, and more
general fulness of face observable among them, indicated their foreign
extraction. Americanization in these particulars takes place in the
second or third generation. They were cleanly and orderly, and looked
well clothed and well fed. In the Illinois system there are ten grades;
the tenth is the lowest in the Primary School, and the first the
highest in the Grammar School. No copy slips are used in these schools.
They write at first from something set before them on the black board
as I noticed was done at Cincinnati. When sufficiently advanced, they
write each day from memory something they were taught on the previous
day. In Chicago the number of children attending school is very much
below the number of those who are of an age to attend. This is what
might have been expected in a town that has grown to such dimensions in
a single generation. Great efforts, however, are being made to overtake
the work. The difficulty just at present is to get school-buildings
quickly enough. It is certain that neither the city itself, nor their
zealous and able superintendent, will fall short of the occasion.

The Americans are in the habit of speaking very disparagingly of their
official class. I never heard one speak in any other tone on this
subject. If the canon, that whatever all men, at all times, and in
all places, affirm must be true, is to be accepted, then this class
in the United States occupies a position of very bad pre-eminence. No
one is spared. ‘The President is a Judas Iscariot who has sold his
country. Senators, and representatives, are a set of log-rollers and
wire-pullers, who make, on an average of the whole body, £6,000 a year
out of their votes in Congress. Judges receive such small salaries,
that they must also receive bribes. Every town councillor (if that is
the right title), every exciseman, every customhouse officer, every
tax assessor, or collector, is open to conviction, if the argument
used be the dollar. They work quick, for they know they have only four
years for making their fortunes.’ These are the mildest terms in which
they inveigh against what they call the universal rottenness, from top
to bottom, of the official class throughout the Union. On this very
dangerous and delicate ground a stranger can only act the part of a
reporter. He cannot give any comment, or even have any opinion of his
own. I feel, however, that I should be guilty of foul ingratitude, if
I did not give the results of my own experience and observation with
respect to one class, at all events, of American public servants. I saw
much of the superintendents of schools, and was everywhere struck with
their devotion to their work, and with their ability. As far as I could
judge, the public are well and faithfully served by these officers.
And as the superintendent in each city is practically, though not
theoretically, the doer of all that is done in the general management,
and is responsible for the condition of all the schools in the city,
his office is, in fact, second in importance to none.

[Sidenote: _How they speak of those in Authority._]

On a Sunday, while I was at Chicago, the gentleman who had given up to
me his berth in the sleeping-car to Cincinnati, took me to see one of
the large Sunday-schools, which have been organised on a very extensive
scale in this great Western city, and from which great results are
expected. The one I went to see is held in a Congregationalist church.
It is customary at the end of the meeting to give out the number of
those who are present, as everybody is supposed to be interested in
the maintenance and spread of the movement. At the meeting I witnessed
there were 998 persons present, of whom 84 were teachers. They now
have in the city 75 of these schools; of these, however, only five are
organised on the scale of the one I am speaking of. One of the five
is held in an Episcopal church, I believe that of the Holy Trinity.
The pupils in these Sunday-schools are not confined to one class in
society, or to children, or to the members of any particular communion.
All classes attend them; so do many grown-up persons, and all religious
denominations, except the Roman Catholics, are to be found among the
taught and the teachers.

The work of the day commenced by singing three hymns, which were
evidently intended to excite religious emotions of a highly
enthusiastic kind. The leading manager then recited the Commandments,
all present repeating, after each commandment, the petition of our
Ante-Communion service. To this was added what follows the commandments
in the American Episcopal service. ‘Hear also what the Lord Jesus
Christ says: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart,
and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and
great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love
thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law
and the prophets.”’ The last chapter in St. Mark’s Gospel was then
read, the chief manager reading the first verse, and all present
simultaneously reading the second, and so on throughout the chapter.
The object of their reading it in this alternate method is to prevent
monotony, and to keep up attention. The pupils had been requested
to commit five verses of this chapter to memory. These verses were
now repeated simultaneously. This was all that was learnt by heart;
and even the learning of this was left entirely to the discretion of
each pupil. A prayer was then offered; but, as a preliminary to it,
the subjects it was proposed to make mention of in the prayer were
announced, with a few brief and pointed comments. The whole assemblage
was now divided into classes of fourteen in each, with a separate
teacher for each. This was done without a single person leaving his
seat, by the simple process of reversing the back of every alternate
seat; so that, where before there were a hundred pews holding seven
persons each, there were now fifty holding fourteen each. The change
was effected in a few seconds. Each teacher now commented on, and
expounded to his class, the five verses that had been committed to
memory. Then followed another hymn, and another short prayer, being
founded entirely on the five verses which had formed the subject for
the day’s instruction. The whole was concluded with the singing of the
Doxology.

[Sidenote: _A Chicago Sunday School._]

This Sunday-school was divided into three grades. First came the
infants. They were placed in a large room behind the west-end gallery,
and over the porch. None of them could read. Nothing was attempted in
this department except awakening the moral sentiments, and teaching
a few facts of Christian history, and if possible a little Christian
doctrine. This was done by telling the children little stories. Three
of these I heard. My friend, who was the chief doer of all that was
done and taught on the occasion of my visit, told these infants, in a
very effective manner, well adapted to their little understandings, how
he had spent on himself, after a long and uncertain struggle (which he
minutely described to them), the first ten cents he had ever possessed;
and how ashamed he afterwards felt of himself.

As soon as they can read, they are promoted into the second grade,
which has its place in the gallery. After a time they are passed on
to the third or highest grade, which has its place in the body of the
church.

It is believed that this Sunday-school organisation has already
effected a great deal of good, by bringing all classes together, and by
influencing, in a way nothing else could, the destitute, the ignorant,
and the reckless. And still more abundant fruit is expected from it in
the future.

Who is there but will entertain bright hopes for America, where among
the rural population the moral tone is sound and healthy, and in the
cities there is so much zeal for doing good?

From the time I left New York till I reached Chicago, I had nowhere
seen in the towns clear drinking water. At New Orleans it was of
the colour of a mulatto, at Cincinnati of a mestizo, and at the
intermediate places of the intermediate shades. At Richmond it had a
kind of ochreous tint. The reason is the same everywhere. The rivers,
with the water of which the towns are supplied, all run through a
yellowish or reddish loamy soil—sometimes sandy, sometimes clayey;
this is easily worn away, and carried off in suspension by the stream,
and is largely added to, after rains, by the surface-washing of the
country. At Chicago, by a boldly-conceived and most successfully
carried-out plan, the whole city is supplied with the purest water. A
tunnel, large enough for two mules to work abreast in it, was carried
out for a distance of two miles beneath the lake. At this point they
had reached water which is perfectly free from all the impurities of
the shore; and here it is admitted into the tunnel in sufficient volume
to supply all the wants of a population of about 280,000 souls. It is
calculated that this tunnel will be ample for all that 100,000 more
inhabitants will require. When the population has grown to this extent,
a second tunnel will have to be constructed. The water is pumped up
from the level of the tunnel to reservoirs that are above the level
of the city: which latter is not the original level of the prairie,
but considerably above it; for it having been found, after a great
part of the city was built, that it was subject to being occasionally
flooded, they raised the ground several feet. In doing this they did
not pull down or bury any part of the streets and blocks of houses
that were already completed, but lifted them up to the desired height
by hydraulic machinery. In this way the Sherman House, one of the
large American hotels (I stayed in it while at Chicago) was elevated
to the level of the raised street, without a guest leaving it, or any
interruption of its business.

[Sidenote: _Post-office Arrangements._]

A foreigner is much struck with the amount of business going on at an
American post-office. Society not being in so settled and stationary a
condition as with us, a far greater proportion of letters are directed
to the post-office, and must be called for. A list of the names of the
persons whose letters have not been called for is printed twice a week,
and hung up in the post-office hall, for the inspection of the public.
This list is divided into three separate parts—English, French, and
German; each part is hung up by itself in its own frame, and there is
a window of enquiry for each of the three nationalities. In the hall
of the post-office, or rather in the screen that separates the office
from the hall, are innumerable pigeon-holes, each with a door to the
hall-side as well as the office-side. The key of the office side door
is kept by the officials, of the hall side door by the person to whom
the box has been assigned. Into this box that person’s letters are put
as soon as a mail is sorted; and he can go, or send at any hour of the
day (or night), unlock his door, and take them out. He is not therefore
obliged to wait for the general delivery, but can get his letters as
soon as the mail arrives. There is, too, less chance of his letters
being lost, for they never get into the hands of the letter-carrier.
And, as everyone whose correspondence is of any consequence adopts this
plan, the number and labour of the letter-carriers are much diminished.
On account of the large amount of business always going on at the
post-office, they separate the ladies from the gentlemen, assigning
them a place for making enquiries, getting their letters, and buying
stamps, quite distinct from that assigned to the men.

These are good arrangements. My personal experience, however, of the
working of the office is not quite favourable. Two-thirds of the
letters posted for me miscarried, and the remaining third I only got
after a great deal of trouble. It is the rule in America that all
officials must be changed as often as the President is changed; and
this for the double reason of enabling the President to reward those
who worked for his election, and because it is a principle in democracy
that all good things of this kind shall be made to go as far as
possible, which can only be done by making the tenure of each occupant
short. I found that this had the disadvantage that the clerks were not
retained so long as to enable them to become familiar with the letter
Z. In consequence of this, in the direction of all the letters written
to me from Europe, it was mistaken for an L; and in the directions of
the letters written to me from New York, where it appears the Z is
decorated with a crossbar, it was mistaken for an F.

[Sidenote: _Americans on Aristocracy._]

The feeling of the Americans on the subject of aristocracy is very
far from being the same in all classes or sections of the community.
I have already made some slight reference to the way in which the
German part of the population regard this institution. We must
consider not only what they think, but also how much they count for
in America. They count for a great deal; because, though they do not
take a very prominent part in politics, still from their numbers, their
intelligence, and their wealth, they form everywhere in the North, and
in a still greater degree in the great West, a very influential portion
of society. And as to this matter, there is no mistaking their thoughts
and feelings. They hate aristocracy, as if it were the foul fiend in
human society; and of all aristocracies they hate that of England the
most, because they regard it as the purest type the world exhibits
of this mighty evil. We may be sure, then, that there is nothing
they would not do to humble the aristocracy of England. Theirs is a
philosophical, instinctive, active, implacable hatred. And the vogue
and influence of it is just in proportion to the strength of the German
element in American society.

But far beyond the Germans in solid telling influence are the great
masses of the native population. They may be described as a stirring,
striving, half-educated people, as very much led by newspapers, and
generally ready believers in local politicians. All these, too, have an
active dislike to the idea of aristocracy, or (as it presents itself to
their matter-of-fact minds) of privileged classes. They condemn it on
two grounds. It is, they say, a ridiculous institution, for it assumes
a superiority which it is impossible can exist; and it is an unjust
institution, because it degrades the great bulk of society, by putting
them in an inferior position. Their ideas on the subject appear to
be more closely connected with contempt than with bitterness. Still
they are distinctly felt, and clearly defined. And they too would be
ready, were there ever an opening for anything of the kind, to join in
a crusade against privileged classes. They would be glad to lend a hand
in the overthrow of any institution which embodies the denial of what
they regard as the natural equality of man.

There remains the class which corresponds with what we call the
Upper Ten Thousand—that is, the class of the refined and highly
educated. Now, these persons do themselves form the aristocracy of
American society. It is true that, speaking generally, they are all
in business of one kind or another, some even in what we would speak
of as retail business; but, in the almost total absence of anything
higher, they constitute, and feel that they do so, a kind of social
aristocracy. And though most of them would, theoretically, condemn
aristocracies, yet they would have neither a contemptuous nor a
bitter feeling against what they were condemning. Some of this class,
following an inextinguishable feeling of human nature, have begun to
look about, and see whether they are not connected by descent with
old families of the old country. And this instantly gives rise to
exclusiveness of feeling, because they are seeking for an advantage in
which the multitude cannot participate. Here, therefore, it would be
contradictory and inconsistent were there any strong feeling against
aristocracy. Of themselves, such persons would be far more disposed to
leave the thing alone, than to join in any endeavours to overturn it.
But, practically, it is of little consequence, except to themselves,
what this class thinks or feels. The majority disposes of everything in
America; and the first step towards gaining its support in the race for
power and place, is to suppress in one’s self everything that would be
distasteful to it.

[Sidenote: _Americans on Aristocracy._]

For himself an American claims the same social position which in Europe
is accorded to the possessors of hereditary wealth and hereditary
titles; and he grounds his claim on the simple fact that he is an
American. It may be as well that we should recognise and that he
should enforce this claim; because it is part of a system which has
for its aim to elevate every individual in the population of a mighty
continent, by awakening in each a sense of political responsibility,
by opening every career to everyone, and by obliging all to think for,
and to depend on, themselves. This is a grander effort than any other
political system has ever before made for humanity; and it is being
worked out under the most favourable circumstances, for in America
there are employment, food, and position for everybody, and no old
and firmly established antagonistic institutions to be fought against
and overthrown in opening the course for the new order of things.
Slavery alone was arrayed against it; but that having been swept away
in a convulsion that was felt not in America only, but all over the
civilised world, the stage is now everywhere perfectly clear, and the
great experiment can be fairly tried.




CHAPTER XIV.

 PRAIRIE FROM CHICAGO TO OMAHA—PLAINS FROM NORTH PLATTE TO THE
 MOUNTAINS—OMAHA, THE INTERSECTION OF THE PACIFIC RAILWAY AND THE
 MISSOURI—TEMPORARY BRIDGE OVER THE MISSOURI—INDIFFERENCE TO RISKS
 AFFECTING LIFE—A PRAIRIE FIRE—THE FOREST ON THE MOUNTAINS ON FIRE—FIRE
 THE CAUSE OF THE TREELESSNESS OF THE PRAIRIES—FIRST-FOUND ANIMAL
 LIFE ABOUNDING IN THE VALLEY OF THE PLATTE—‘THE HARDEST PLACE, SIR,
 ON THIS CONTINENT’—ITS PREDECESSOR—HOW IT IS POSSIBLE TO ESTABLISH
 LYNCH LAW AT SHYENNE—MY FIRST NIGHT IN SHYENNE—A SECOND NIGHT AT
 SHYENNE—NECESSITY AND ADVANTAGES OF LYNCH LAW—‘THE USE OF THE
 PISTOL’—A MAN SHOT BECAUSE ‘HE MIGHT HAVE DONE SOME MISCHIEF’—NEWNESS
 OF ASPECTS BOTH OF SOCIETY AND OF NATURE.


I left Chicago for the Rocky Mountains at 3 P. M. Twice the day wore
out, and twice the night came down on the prairie, and twice the sun
rose from the level horizon as it were out of the sea; and the third
night was closing in upon us, before the iron horse, that never tires,
could bring us to the farther side of the land-ocean, here 1,000 miles
wide. And such is the scale of all alike, of plains and valleys, of
rivers, forests, lakes and mountains, in the United States.

In this journey we crossed the Mississippi at Fulton, by a covered
wooden bridge a mile in length, the Missouri at Omaha, and the north
fork of the Platte, at a place called North Platte, by a bridge that
appeared to be about half a mile long.

[Sidenote: _The Prairie to Omaha._]

As far as Omaha—that is, for the first 500 miles—and then again for
some distance beyond Omaha, the prairie is generally of a deep black
soil, capable of producing most abundant crops of anything. The first
300 miles is all settled. The remainder is taken up and partially
settled, of course more closely in the neighbourhood of Omaha, and
none of it can now be had in lots contiguous to the railway at less
than thirty dollars an acre. This will give some conception of the
inexhaustible agricultural wealth of the United States.

As the Platte is approached, you enter on the dry prairie, where there
is not sufficient rain to admit of cultivation. There is, however,
abundance of the finest grass for sheep and cattle, and this continues
for 300 miles more to the foot of the mountains. This dry region is
called ‘The Plains.’

Of all the astonishing sights in this land of surprises, none takes one
more by surprise than the town of Omaha. At home we have been taught
to regard Chicago as the extremity of civilisation, and therefore
as one of the wonders of the world. But when you have turned your
back on Chicago, and been borne away into the western prairie by the
locomotive for 500 miles, you find that you have reached a thriving
town, of brick buildings and large hotels, containing now 16,000
inhabitants, and which is destined to become—probably in a very few
years—a second Chicago. For, being on the Pacific Railway, the grandest
of all railways, as well as on that grandest of all arterial lines of
water-communication, the Missouri, which is navigable for a thousand
miles beyond the town for the same steamer that might have ascended
the stream from New Orleans, it must soon become the depôt for the
two greatest lines of American traffic—that between the East and the
West, and that between the North and the South, which will cross here.
It does not appear possible that anything can arise to prevent its
expanding, with a rapidity unexampled even in America, into one of the
great commercial centres of this vast and rich continent.

During the summer the Missouri had been crossed by a steam-ferry. But
to save a little time in the transit, and the trouble of keeping a
passage for the ferry free from ice during the winter, the railway had
been carried across the river, as soon as the frost became severe, on
two rows of piles, which rose only a few inches above the surface of
the ice. This was merely intended for the three or four months during
which it would be buttressed and strengthened by the ice. As soon
as that should begin to break up, it would be swept away. In going
westward, the train I was in was made to traverse it at a snail’s
pace, for fear of shaking it to pieces, but even with this caution it
wavered and groaned alarmingly. On returning some weeks afterwards,
when the ice was hourly expected to break up, the train I recrossed
it in was the last that used it. Again we traversed it, at a snail’s
pace, feeling our way as we went; again we heard the creaking, and
saw the bending and swaying of the rickety fabric, many fearing that
this last journey would be the one too many, and that it would not
be swept away by the ice, but shaken to pieces by use. In no other
country would so reckless a disregard of risks, imperilling life, be
tolerated. But here neither the public, nor the contrivers of these
risks, nor the possible or actual sufferers by them, appear to give
these matters a thought; or, if they do, they probably regard them from
the commercial point of view—that it would be hard to interfere with
anyone who was endeavouring to make money, and that the public ought
to be left to decide for themselves whether it is, or is not, worth
their while to run the risks to which they are invited. The day after I
left Cincinnati, the ‘Magnolia’ steamer blew up, and more than eighty
lives were lost. About the same time some terrific railway accidents
occurred; but, as far as I could judge, no one seemed to think that on
these occasions blame could attach to anyone.

[Sidenote: _Prairie Fires._]

At a distance of about sixty miles from Omaha, on the second night
of my journeying through the prairie, I saw it on fire. It was on
the right-hand side to one going westward, and did not reach up to
the rails within a mile or two. The front of the fire, as we passed
along it, was a line of five or six miles. The flames had not an
uniform appearance. In slight depressions, where moisture hung longer,
and therefore the grass and prairie plants were thick and high, the
flames rose about fifteen feet; but where the blazing had subsided,
the smouldering remains of plants that had more substance than the
rest, appeared like rows of stars. There was smoke visible only where
there was much flame, and the lazy masses of smoke were illuminated
by the glare of the flames beneath. As in one place there was
something burning above the general level, we supposed that it was the
dwelling-house of some prairie settler that was being destroyed.

I also, during four days, saw the pine and poplar forest, on the
mountain above the town of Boulder, on fire. I was not so near to this
as I had been to the prairie fire; but it did not strike me, judging
however from a distance, that its effects were grander. There seemed a
great deal more smoke than flame, which streamed off down the wind like
large bodies of cloud. I heard, however, that sometimes the appearance
of the forest burning on the mountains was very grand. I observed,
wherever I penetrated into the Rocky Mountains, that a great part of
the wood had been destroyed in this way. The fire generally occurs
through the carelessness of persons who are camping out. The waste of
valuable timber is thus enormous.

As one passes over the prairie, the conviction becomes irresistible
that fire is the sole cause of the absence of trees. The prairie was
once covered with trees, because when fire is kept off by cultivation,
and the earth loosened by the plough, so as to admit light and air to
a greater depth than before, young trees at once appear. Of course
the parent trees must, at some time or other, have grown on the spot.
All the seeds that were sufficiently near the undisturbed surface to
germinate had germinated, and the young plants that issued from them
had been destroyed by fire. Those seeds which chance had buried more
deeply waited for the aid of man to give proof of their presence in the
soil.

[Sidenote: _Animal Life on the Plains._]

Again, both forest and fruit trees, when planted by the hand of man,
thrive well in the prairie, if only fire be kept from them. And
wherever in the prairie, as on the rocky faces of bluffs, or the banks
of streams, fire cannot reach, on account of the absence of sufficient
grass and undergrowth to convey it, trees—as pines, oaks, willows, and
poplars—abound. The great accumulations of black vegetable mould are to
be accounted for in the same way; they are formed out of the burnt and
half-burnt vegetable matter left by the annual fires of no one can tell
how long a period. In the valley of the Platte, this vegetable mould
appears to have been carried away by the stream, which has ever been
shifting its channel from side to side, between the bluffs which bound
the valley—in so doing floating off the lighter portions of the soil,
and leaving sand and gravel only in its deserted beds.

On the dry prairie between Omaha and the mountains I saw, for the first
time, some of the _feræ naturæ_ of America in abundance. Hitherto
I had frequently observed that there was almost a total absence of
animal life from the roadside. I could count up the rare occasions on
which I had seen either bird or beast. I had twice seen colonies of
a social crow resembling our rook. In Georgia I had seen two birds,
one about the size of a thrush, and the other rather smaller than a
sparrow. In Alabama I had seen some wild deer and wild ducks. In a
journey of several thousand miles I had seen no other wild four-footed
or feathered creature. I had attributed the deficiency of the latter
partly to the severity of American winters, which had taught them
migratory habits, and partly to the sparseness of the population
in the Southern States; for though it is true that the presence of
civilised man is incompatible with the existence of some species,
yet there are other species to which man, by his cultivation of the
ground, and as it were by the crumbs that fall from his table, becomes
the chief purveyor, and whose numbers therefore increase almost in
proportion to the degree in which a country becomes settled. But
here, on this arid plain, and in mid-winter, neither naturalist nor
sportsman could have had anything to complain of. Animal life was in
abundance. In the course of one day I saw from the windows of the car
three herds of antelopes (in one of which I counted thirty-eight), two
wolves, prairie-fowl in great numbers, plenty of a species of bird
resembling our English lark, several hawks, and innumerable colonies
of prairie-dogs. As their villages are frequently at a distance from
water, these agile and amusing little animals are supposed to be
capable of living without drinking. I saw nothing of the owls and
rattlesnakes who have been admitted by the prairie-dogs to a joint
tenancy of their subterranean homes. Doubtless, if one were to examine
on foot the banks of the river, and the rocky bluffs that bound the
valley, my small list might easily be made a large one. The valley was
strewed for hundreds of miles with the bones of the buffalo, and marked
with the still unobliterated basins which showed the spot in which he
had rolled himself in the dry sandy soil on coming up out of the water
of the Platte. Experience corrects the common error that animal life in
any district will be found in proportion to the vigour of its vegetable
life. Nowhere is vegetation more vigorous than in the mighty forests of
South America and Western Africa, but they are very far from abounding
in animal life. On the contrary, vegetable life is poor and scanty in
Southern Africa, and nowhere in the world is there so great a number
of species and of individuals of the larger quadrupeds. Something
similar is observable in the dry valley of the Platte, the obvious
requirement being not abundance of vegetation, but enough of that kind
of vegetation the animals require, and either that kind of covert, or
such an absence of covert, as shall most conduce to their security.

[Sidenote: _‘Hardest Place, Sir, on this Continent.’_]

Frequently, when I had mentioned my intention of going to the Rocky
Mountains by way of Omaha and Denver, I had been cautioned against
Shyenne city—‘Sir, it is the hardest place on this continent;’ by
which was meant that it contained a choicer collection of hardened
villains, and a larger proportion of them to its population, than
any other place, and that, in consequence, it was harder there than
anywhere else to keep out of a scrape. It is called Shyenne, because
nine months before I was there, at which time it had three thousand
inhabitants, the Chien or Dog Indians had scalped a white man on what
was then the open prairie, but is now the site of the city. Nine months
had sufficed for building and peopling the city. City on the Plains may
mean a single house. At a place called ‘La Park,’ where there was but
one wooden shanty, I heard a gentleman ask its proprietor ‘if anyone
was then talking about building a second house in that city?’ Shyenne
city is built entirely of wood. There is no company that will insure
any goods or houses in the place. What so suddenly called it into
existence was the opening of the Pacific Railway to this point. Here,
then, everyone coming from the Pacific and Ultramontane States takes
the rail for the East, and everyone leaving the rail for one of those
States takes his place in one of Wells and Fargo’s coaches. There are
therefore people always arriving from both directions, with plenty of
money. It is also the natural rendezvous (as there is nothing behind it
for five hundred miles back to Omaha) for all those who are employed
beyond it in the construction of the railway through the mountains,
to spend their money at, and for many too of the gold-washers and
gold-miners from the mountains. All these are the birds of passage of
the place; but they it is who attract the two classes of permanent
inhabitants, if such a word is suitable to any residents in a town only
nine months old. Of these two classes one is respectable, the other
not. The respectable class is that of the tradesmen; the one that is
not consists of the rowdies, gamblers, and desperadoes, who have always
formed the scum and dirt on the top of the foremost wave of advancing
civilisation in America, and which that wave has now borne on to this
place, and thrown them into it all together.

[Sidenote: _‘Hardest Place, Sir, on this Continent.’_]

The same causes, in the winter of 1866-67, made a place called
Julesburg, about one hundred and fifty miles back from Shyenne, the
point at which for the time extreme rowdyism, but of a lower class
and on a smaller scale, was concentrated. Being then the extreme
point of the Pacific Railway, the teamsters, freighters, and their
hangers-on, and those from the neighbourhood who join such gatherings,
were all here collected together. A town of waggon corals and wooden
houses was soon formed in this way, containing about one thousand
inhabitants—almost all men, and almost all reckless and violent
characters. I asked a man who was himself connected with the freighting
business, and had been part of last winter at Julesburg, how things had
gone on at the place, and how order had been maintained? He said that
at first no attempt at all was made to have things right, but that
when it began to be known as a hell upon earth—almost every day two or
three men being murdered or killed in rows—a few policemen were sent.
They did not, however, prove of the slightest use, for they were quite
unable to arrest anybody, or to hinder anything. If they had made the
attempt, they would have been shot as readily as anyone else. When I
was at the spot in February 1868, not a trace of the Julesburg of the
previous year remained. Everything, both houses and men, had moved on
to Shyenne. A prairie station on the railway alone marked the place
where the town had been.

The difference between last year’s and this year’s headquarters of
rowdyism arises out of the better chance Shyenne has, as it is situated
at the foot of the mountains, of maintaining a permanent existence,
and if so of rapidly becoming a flourishing place of business. This
has attracted to it a large number of storekeepers, who of course
set up, as soon as they were strong enough to do so, the reign of
vigilance committees and lynch law. In such places these are the means
universally adopted for enforcing honesty and order.

[Sidenote: _‘Hardest Place, Sir, on this Continent.’_]

I reached Shyenne a little after dark. Having been fully warned of the
character of the place, I had taken the precaution of enquiring what
were the names of the two least rowdy hotels. The moment the train
reached the station, I was off, bag in hand, for the first chance of a
bed-room. On my asking, at the larger of the two, for a room I might
occupy alone, I was told they had no such accommodation. I then went
on to the other, where the same answer was given to the same enquiry.
I was determined not to take the chances of a night with a Shyenne
desperado, so I again sallied forth in search of a lodging—this time,
however, not knowing where to turn. At last my from-house-to-house
investigation brought me to a wooden structure, on which were painted
the words ‘The Wyoming House.’ It was far from having an inviting look:
in fact it had more the appearance of a drinking-booth than of a place
where one could find a bed-room. But as it was the only house I had
seen (hotels are here all called houses), I thought the best thing I
could do would be to go to some tradesman, and take my chance of his
telling me whether it was, or was not, a safe place. A chemist, it
appeared to me, would be as little likely as any to be dependent on the
rowdies; so I entered the first shop of that kind I could see, to make
the enquiry. If I had looked in through the window, I should certainly
not have opened the door; for the first object that met my eyes was a
rough, lying on the ground in front of the stove. His hair and beard
appeared not to have been combed for months, and by his side was lying
a gigantic mastiff. But, as it was too late to recede, I turned to the
chemist—a youth apparently of less than twenty years of age, who was
seated on the counter—and put my enquiry to him. ‘Wall, stranger,’ he
said, taking his cigar from his mouth, and speaking very deliberately,
‘if it is a night when they have got no dance—for they give a dance
twice a-week to the ladies and gentlemen of the city—I calculate you
may get through; but if it is a dancing night, I calculate you will
do better outside.’ On looking in, and finding that it was not a
dancing night, I applied for and was shown to a bed-room. On entering,
however, I observed that the lock of the door had been lately forced,
for it was hanging loose by a single nail. In a house that admitted of
such proceedings, I declined to take a room the door of which could
not be locked. After making some difficulties, the attendant showed me
to another room. On entering it I turned the key, and as it appeared
to act properly, I told him it would do, and took possession. But on
attempting to get the bolt of the lock into the doorpost, I found that
things were not so square as that it could be done in a moment, some
violence having been used against this door also. While I was ‘fixing’
this matter, which I eventually succeeded in doing, I fancied I heard
men and women gambling in the next room a great deal too distinctly;
and on looking in that quarter I saw a considerable hole in the wall,
which admitted of anyone observing from the next room what I was about.
This I stopped up with a Chicago newspaper I happened to have with me.
My last thought was to ascertain whether the window which opened at the
head of my bed had any fastening, and whether one could escape through
it in case of a fire—a matter that must always be attended to in these
wooden towns. I found that it opened into a back courtyard; that it had
no fastening of any kind; and that one might open it from the outside
with a single finger. I did not like this, nor anything that I had seen
in the house; but as Judge Lynch had hung up two men in the main street
of the town only a few nights before, I thought that all the good
effect had probably not yet evaporated, and so was soon asleep. The
next morning, when I offered payment, the landlord demurred accepting
it immediately, and beckoning to one of his men, sent him off to see if
all was right. On the man’s returning, and giving him a nod, he took
my money. I asked what was the meaning of this. ‘Oh,’ he replied, ‘it
is not the custom to settle accounts here till you are sure that none
of your blankets have been made away with in the night through the
window.’ Blankets here are hard to get, and of some value for camping
out.

I passed part of another night at Shyenne, on my return from the
mountains. The coach reached the chief hotel of the place at three
o’clock in the morning. I had expected at that hour to find things
tolerably quiet; but on entering, I had to pass, first some people in a
state of riotous drunkenness at the bar; then about twenty men sitting
or sleeping round the stove; and, lastly, a parcel of people playing
and rowing at two billiard-tables. Beyond all these was the clerk’s
counter. On entering my name, and asking whether I could have a room to
myself, I was assured that I could.

‘Give me a receipt, then,’ I said, ‘for my bag and rug, and let me be
shown to my room.’

‘Is there any other passenger on board the coach?’ the clerk enquired.

[Sidenote: _‘Hardest Place, Sir, on this Continent.’_]

I told him there was one. He asked me to wait till he had come in,
and then the boy—the new name for manservant—would only have to make
one journey in showing us to our rooms. I assented. At last the other
passenger came in, and the clerk gave his instructions to the boy.
In doing this I observed that he only gave him one key, from which
I instantly inferred that I was done, and was only to have, after
all, a part of a room; but I decided to submit, for there were only
three hours to be passed in bed, and my fellow-passenger was a highly
respectable storekeeper of Denver; and if I had gone out of the hotel,
at that hour of the morning, with my luggage in my hand, all the
rowdies about the billiard-tables, the stove, and the bar, would have
known that I was going in search of a lodging, and some might perhaps
have followed me out. But on the boy’s opening the door, and setting
down the lamp, while he said, ‘Gentlemen, here is your apartment,’ I
was no longer equal to the occasion; for now I saw—the possibility of
which had never before crossed my mind—that I was expected to occupy
the same bed with another man; and I gave vent to my indignation by
observing, ‘that it was really too bad to be billeted off to half a
bed, when I had been promised a room to myself.’ ‘As to the room to
yourself,’ replied the boy, ‘I know nothing about that, and the thing
is passed; but it is very unreasonable in you to complain about having
half a bed, when it is a bed that is intended to hold three people.’

I asked my fellow-passenger not to regard it as anything personal that
I was unable to occupy the same bed as himself, telling him that I
would lie down in my clothes. Our first care, however, was to arrange
what we should do in case of fire, for part of the house we were in
had been in flames only a few nights before. In such a place sleep was
impossible. Our room was exactly over the kitchen, and the floor having
been made originally of unseasoned wood, the heat had shrunk it, so
that there were gaps everywhere. Through these came up all night from
the kitchen the effluvium of beefsteaks and onions, which were being
cooked incessantly for the gamblers, who would themselves have kept
anyone awake with the noise they made, the chief part of it consisting
of the most ingenious and horrible oaths one ever heard, or will ever
hear, as swearing is everywhere else becoming obsolete. On coming
down, a little after six, for the seven-o’clock train, I found a few
persons still drunk about the bar; and all the rest of those I had seen
three hours before were now asleep on the floor, on chairs, or on the
billiard-tables. These are persons who do not care for beds, or who
would rather spend the price of them in drinking and gambling.

[Sidenote: _Lynch Law and the Pistol._]

I mentioned that in my first night at Shyenne, I calculated on the
effect two recent lynch-law executions would have in keeping things
quiet for a season. About that time I heard of five other executions of
the same kind in that neighbourhood. There are people who denounce this
method of maintaining order, but they do so without understanding the
circumstances. At all events, a man has been known to exclaim loudly
against it in New England, and before he had been in the West a month,
to join a vigilance committee. The fact is that the ordinary method
of administering law is quite impracticable in a place where you can
get no policemen, no constables, no lawyers, no juries, no jails, no
judges; and where, if it were possible to get the apparatus of justice,
it would be next to impossible to work it. Some one or other would be
bribed, or some flaw would be established in the evidence, and there
would be time and opportunity enough, in one way or another, for the
escape of the prisoner. Instead of this, here is a system which has
no officers or jails, which costs nothing, and is very terrifying to
evildoers by the rapidity and certainty with which it acts, and the
mystery with which it is involved. It would be a very unnecessary and
evil system in a settled community, but where none of the ordinary
appliances of law are possible, and where at the same time all the
scum of the great world behind is concentrated, it is a necessity, and
a highly beneficial one. It does really what Napoleon III. claims to
have done for France: it saves society, which without it would cease
to exist, for it would be overwhelmed by these reckless and desperate
characters. Everyone in America knows how completely in California
it got rid of all the disorderly and dangerous elements which were
collected there in such force, that it would have been quite hopeless
to have attempted to deal with them in any other way. Just so, again,
it was at Denver, a town on this side the mountains, of eight thousand
inhabitants, now as orderly and well-disposed as any other eight
thousand persons anywhere to be found. Four or five years ago Denver
was what Shyenne is now. But lynch law has purified it, and in a way in
which ordinary law has never purified any community in the world. All
the rogues and violent fellows have been hanged, and all the suspected
have been made to clear out. There are now no other such eight thousand
souls in any part of the Old States. A man who knows both would rather
leave his baggage out all night in the street at Denver than in any
city of New England. This is the state into which a community has been
brought when lynch law hands it over to ordinary law.

But lynch law is only half the system. It is always accompanied by
something else, which I have heard described as ‘the use of the
pistol.’ This has, from the first, been maintained in America long
after Judge Lynch has retired from the scene. It is still not unknown
in Washington and New York. But in the ever-advancing frontier of
civilisation, it has all along been in active operation. Every man in
the West goes always armed. And it is one of the most imperative of
the laws of Western society, that, if a man insults you in any way,
you are bound then and there to shoot him dead. Society requires you
to do it, and if you do not, you will be shot yourself; for the man
who has insulted you, supposing that you can only be waiting for an
opportunity, will think it better to be beforehand with you. This is
their substitute for the old European law of duelling, which required
that if a man insulted you, you should give him a chance of shooting
you also. The Western plan is that you should shoot him. It is enforced
too by the same kind of social considerations, and attended by the same
immunities, and its object is the same—to oblige men, at the peril of
their lives, to behave themselves discreetly and politely.

[Sidenote: _‘He might have done some Mischief.’_]

The following incident was told me by a thoroughly credible eyewitness:
it will show how cheaply society holds, in this part of the world, the
lives of its troublesome members. A dozen or more men were seated,
drinking and smoking and yarning, in front of the bar of a Shyenne
hotel. One of the troublesome class, in whom whisky was just then
overcoming discretion, took out his revolver, and, flourishing it
about, announced that everyone present had to acknowledge that he was
the finest fellow in the world. Just as he said this two gentlemen
came in, and, not knowing what was passing, walked up to the bar,
close to where the swaggerer was seated. This took off his attention
from the rest of the company, for he now turned to the newcomers, and
pointing his pistol at the one nearest to him, told him to make the
acknowledgment. The gentleman, finding himself taken at a disadvantage,
and thinking it most likely that, if he put his hand behind him for
his pistol, he should, while doing so, be shot by the tipsy desperado,
began to do as he was required. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘you are a monstrous
fine fellow; I had no idea there were such fine fellows out here.’
While he was saying this, his companion took his own pistol from its
sling behind him, put it to the swaggerer’s head, and blew out his
brains. As the man fell to the ground, and he deliberately replaced
his pistol, he said, by way not so much of explanation as of comment,
‘That chap might have done some mischief.’ Not another remark was
made or word spoken on the occasion. Those who were in favour of
order said nothing, as they approved of what had been done; while
those who belonged to the troublesome class were also silent, because
they thought it wiser not to show their colours. When it suited the
manager’s convenience, he sent one of the boys of the hotel to dig a
hole in the prairie for the corpse; and with that the matter ended.

Having breakfasted at six, I was out at the first dawn, and again, as
I frequently did afterwards, saw the sun rise on the prairie. Till
he was above the horizon, and it was full day, it was impossible to
distinguish the prairie from the sea. The same effect is also at times
during the day observable. In the morning I even saw something like
rippling waves on the surface, resulting, I suppose, from the way in
which the level rays struck upon the little inequalities of the foot
or two of haze that rested on the ground. At a distance of forty or
fifty miles the snowy range was already tinted with light, while the
lower intervening ranges were still black masses. The aspects of human
society, as well as of outward nature, are here so unlike anything
with which the English traveller is familiar at home, that he is ever
feeling conscious that new pictures are being added to the furniture of
his mind.




CHAPTER XV.

 THE ARMAMENT AND EXPERIENCE OF A GERMAN HERDMASTER—A STAGE-COACH
 ON THE PLAINS—THE PARTY IN THE COACH—THE ONLY COLONEL I MET IN THE
 UNITED STATES—THE COLONEL’S WIFE—A COLORADO HERDMASTER—A PHILADELPHIAN
 GRADUATE—TWO JOCOSE DENVER STORE-KEEPERS—ADVANTAGE OF HAVING ONE’S
 RIFLE IN THE COACH—A CALIFORNIAN’S ACCOUNT OF A SKIRMISH WITH
 INDIANS—MANNERS AND LIFE AT A HOUSE ON THE PLAINS—A LADY OF THE
 PLAINS—AMERICAN SOCIETY JUDGES MEN FAIRLY—BETWEEN SHYENNE AND DENVER.

[Sidenote: _Armament of a German Herdmaster._]

While I was waiting for the Denver coach, and watching the changing
scene, a German, with whom I had had some conversation in the railway
car for the two previous days, arrived at the coach-office. We were
both to start at the same time by stage—he for 1,200 miles over the
mountains; I to coast along the mountains to Denver, the point at which
I proposed entering them. On meeting him he held out his hand, saying,
‘Well, I see we have both got safe through the night. But,’ he added,
‘I was prepared for them if anyone had meddled with me, I had sixteen
bullets ready.’ As he said this, he drew aside his coat to show me
his eight-shooting revolver hanging at his back; and then putting his
hands into his breeches pockets, took from each a small four-shooter.
This gentleman told me that he was doing very well as a stock-keeper
in Oregon and Idaho; that he had had Durham cattle driven and carried
by rail from New York to these Pacific States, more than 3,000 miles,
in which journey, of course, they had crossed the prairies and the
Rocky Mountains. He knew all the Pacific coast well, having been in the
States of California, Washington, or Oregon; in British Columbia, and
in Sitka. Of British Columbia he thought nothing ever could be made, as
there was no agricultural land in the colony. At Cariboo everything,
even to flour, cost a dollar per pound. The Indians about Sitka were
the largest men he had ever seen; few were less than six feet in height
or 200 pounds in weight. I never met with one of this description of
settlers who belonged to any branch of the Latin race; they are all
Anglo-Saxons, Scandinavians, or Germans.

[Sidenote: _In a Coach on the Plains._]

The coach started at seven o’clock, with six fine horses. There was
no postilion for the leaders, as was customary in our coaching days.
The driver divided the reins between both hands, and off we started
at a gallop. Perhaps some of the Shyennese, who witnessed our dashing
departure, would not have been sorry to have left the place with us.
The coach was full. It was constructed (but without the befitting
capacity) to carry nine persons inside and three outside. Experience
only can enable one to comprehend how much packing and squeezing and
contriving are requisite for arranging nine persons in a space barely
sufficient for six. You must imagine a coach a size larger than our old
stages; and when three persons have been jammed into the front, and
as many into the back seat, a bench is let down from the side which
reaches from door to door—and on this three more persons, to speak
ironically, are accommodated. Though it was mid-winter, I should have
liked my neighbours all the better had they been a little further
off. What then must be the effects of such proximity on an American
summer-day, with the thermometer on the roof of the coach at 120°,
and a cloud of prairie dust pouring in at the window? If one of these
Western coaches—destined for its whole existence to work on the plains
and mountains, and never to pass over a furlong of made road, could
have been exhibited in London and Paris in ’62 and ’67, people on this
side would have been astonished at the strength of their springs, and
of the whole of their construction.

We were full inside, and two of the outside places were occupied.
The party was composed of eight gentlemen and three ladies. First
came a good-humoured jovial colonel, the only colonel I met in the
United States, where I must have made the acquaintance of not far
short of fifty generals. He had long been on the Indian frontier,
and had conducted many an expedition against them. His professional
warfare being now over, he had taken to gold-mining and trading in the
mountains. As he lived somewhere up on the Laramie plains, he laid
his account with having a few more brushes with his old dusky friends
before the time came, not now far distant, when their name would only
stand for what once had been. He was still in the prime of life, as
everybody is in the West. He had one child—nobody has more in the
United States. There was nothing characteristic in these particulars;
nor, perhaps, was there in his practice of carrying with him in his
journeys a wickered magnum, and two kegs of whisky. Their contents were
of different degrees of proof, and of different qualities, adapted to
the varying circumstances and different hours of the day. Strength was
the special merit of the magnum, which was intended for after-dinner
use. It was regarded as a liqueur, or stomachic. The qualities of one
keg made it suitable for the early part of the day; the qualities of
the other fitted it for the evening. But it did not appear that the
Colonel carried about the magnum and two kegs for his own especial
benefit; for whenever we stopped for a meal, and sometimes only when
horses were changed, if the interval seemed a long one, the keg with
the black hoops, or the keg with the green hoops, or the magnum was
taken from the boot, and everybody near was invited to ‘take a drink.’
Even the man who was changing the horses was not omitted. Could it be
that the Colonel was one of the proprietors of the coach, and therefore
desirous of making things as pleasant as possible to the passengers?
This could not be the case, for the names of Wells and Fargo, the great
American coaching firm, were on the panels. The true explanation, I
believe, was that on the surface—that the Colonel had a heart as large
as his head was strong, and that heaven itself would be no heaven to
him if he could not share it with his friends—his friends being all
those with whom at the moment he happened to be in contact. There was
another point, besides that of being content with the rank of Colonel,
in which he was unlike his countrymen, and that was his English
aversion to the inside of a coach.

[Sidenote: _In a Coach on the Plains._]

The Colonel’s wife acted as cicerone of the country to the inside
passengers. She knew the names of all the conspicuous mountains, and
how far off they were; what accidents had ever happened on the route,
and where there had been Indian fights, down to the one of last summer.

Next in prominence came a Colorado herdmaster, and his sister, whom he
was taking from her home in Pennsylvania to keep house for him on the
plains, at a place called the Garden of the Gods. Everyone contributed
what he could to make the day pass agreeably, and this gentleman’s
contributions consisted in scraps of poetry and little high flown
speeches suggested by the sights and occurrences of the moment.

There was also a lady who had made seventeen voyages across the
Atlantic and Pacific (I suppose with her husband), and was now
returning from a visit to her relations in the State of New York. Her
husband was the owner of a mine in the mountains. Whenever called upon
she was ready with a song.

The seat next to her was occupied by a well-informed and gentlemanly
man. He was a Philadelphian, and had graduated at some American
university. I collected that he was going to the mountains to look
after some mines in which he was interested.

Two Denver storekeepers (but as town is here construed into city, so is
storekeeper into merchant) completed our party. Their forte was that
style of humour which is known as American. For instance, apropos to a
conversation on the long-sightedness some people are said to acquire on
the plains, Mr. A. asks Mr. B., ‘Whether he can see that fly on the top
of that chimney?’ Mr. B. replies, ‘I am not quite sure I can see it,
but I can hear it scratching its head.’ Mr. A. having been silent for
some time is supposed to have been asleep: Mr. B. therefore requests
him ‘to repeat the remark he had just been making.’ To this sally he
replies, ‘If there is anything I have said which I shall hereafter have
reason to regret, I am glad of it.’

One of these two storekeepers had a literary turn, and was in the habit
of giving lectures in Denver and the mining towns in the mountains,
where I saw several of his posters on the walls. He informed me that he
had then in the press a humorous poem entitled ‘Life in Colorado.’

The other had strong sporting proclivities, and never went a journey
by coach or rail without his sixteen-shooter rifle in his hand, for
the chance of an antelope, or wolf, or whatever might cross his path.
The year before last he had found, on this very road and coach, his
practice of never moving unaccompanied by his rifle of use. A party of
about a hundred Indians came down from the hills yelling, and firing
on the coach. The gentlemen who were in it—they were all armed—got
out to meet them, as they could do little when huddled together
inside, and the horses and driver would soon have been shot. After the
second volley, the driver finding that the Indians were not scared,
got scared himself, and insisted on their all getting into the coach
again, and his being allowed to drive off. They got in, leaving two
of their number dead. The Indians followed for some little distance,
and killed one more. The gentleman who told us this incident of
travelling in summer on the plains—in winter the Indians are never
troublesome—received in the skirmish a wound from an Indian bullet, in
the back of his left hand. The ball passed through, shattering the
bone. The hole remains as a memento of the day.

[Sidenote: _Californian Sixteen-shooters._]

Such are the kind of persons one meets in a coach on the plains; and
such is the way in which they while away the time.

On my return from the Rocky Mountains we found a Californian waiting
for the train at North Platte. He had just come over the Sierra Nevada
and Rocky Mountain ranges in a sleigh, in mid-winter. For the greater
part of the way he had been alone. One of his feet was frostbitten.
He was a little man, but appeared capable of daring anything, and of
going through a great deal. His eye was quick, and very unlike that
of men bred in towns or quiet farms. At this very point, many years
ago, he had tried to carry his waggons across the Platte when the
waters were out, and the river ten miles wide; but, having failed in
the attempt, he had gone up the stream till he headed the freshet. His
rifle was never out of his hand. I asked him, seeing that the barrel
was somewhat short, at what distance it would kill an antelope. ‘It was
not made,’ he said, ‘for antelope hunting, but it would kill one at
eight hundred yards. It was the rifle used against the Indians. It was
a sixteen-shooter.’ I asked him if it had ever been used in that way.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘a few years ago the Indians were very troublesome, and
thirty of us went out after them with these sixteen-shooters. They came
on to meet us. There were four hundred of them, all mounted. At the
first volley we fired, many of their saddles were emptied; still they
persevered in attacking us, for a day and a night; but as they always
had to retire to reload, and we had not, we had a great advantage over
them. At last, when we had killed eighty of them, and they had killed
nine of us, we got towards morning upon the top of a hill, where there
was a kind of natural breastwork of rock, and they could not approach
us without being exposed to our fire: they then gave up the game, and
drew off. These sixteen-shooters cost in California forty dollars; but
mine has so long been my companion day and night, and has so often
saved my life, that I would not take any money for it.’ As he said this
he turned it round, to see if there was any speck of dirt or rust upon
it, handling it gently as if he loved it.

[Sidenote: _Manners on the Plains._]

Perfect ease and equality, without any obtrusiveness or vulgar
assumption, appeared to me to be the true characteristics of the
manners of the plains. I spent a day and night at a solitary house
where the proprietor combined the two employments of cattle-breeding
and inn-keeping. I happened to be at the time the only guest. The
accommodation was not bad. It consisted of a large room, used for
smoking and for the bar; of a better furnished room for meals; and of
a drawing-room, properly belonging to the mistress of the house, but
into which favoured guests were invited. I here found several files
of local and American papers, and among them the ‘London Illustrated
News.’ The herdsmen of the proprietor took their meals with the guests.
Before sitting down they always washed their hands and faces, and
combed their hair. There was nothing at all disagreeable in their
conversation or manners. They spoke good English, as all Americans
do, and were unconstrained, as all Americans are. I had noticed on
the previous evening that they had remarkably good appetites, and at
breakfast, the next morning, I ‘made a note’ of what it took to satisfy
the broadest-shouldered and hungriest-looking of the party. First, he
called for beefsteak: the lad in waiting brought him about a pound,
with a little dish of fried potatoes. This he soon disposed of. He then
called for sausages. His next plate was ham and eggs. This was followed
by a dish of slap-jacks, a kind of pancake eaten with butter and syrup.
He finished with a dish of dried apples stewed. This was at half-past
six in the morning. At the same hour in the evening, he would have much
the same kind of supper, and at noon much the same kind of dinner. But
these men live out of doors, and chiefly in the saddle, galloping over
a plain four thousand feet above the level of the sea, with a very
bracing and invigorating climate. The lady of the house had been well
brought up in New England, and her manners were pleasing. She had no
help, and did all the cooking herself. They had an only child, then
just five years old, but whom—for children are very forward here—one
might have taken for seven. His chief amusement, while I was here, was
catching the pigs and dogs with an Indian lasso made of buckskin.

At La Porte, a city of three or four houses, a lady of prepossessing
appearance got into the coach. The wife of the Colonel I have mentioned
shook hands with her; and we had some pleasant conversation about
the society of the plains and mountains. She was very decided in her
preference for it over that of cities. She thought that life in old
settled districts was mere existence and not life. She talked of the
delights of camping out, and of long excursions of fifty or eighty
miles on horseback. At La Park the Colonel handed her out of the coach.
Supper was soon announced, and we took our places at the table, when
the lady who had been conversing so pleasantly in the coach appeared
behind my chair and asked me, in an easy and well-mannered way, what I
would take. I saw now that she was the landlady of the little roadside
inn at which we had stopped, and that she did the waiting herself. She
supplied everybody with what they required, changed the plates, filled
the glasses and cups, and brought whatever was wanted, all the time
talking much as the mistress of a house would talk to her guests.

But though perfect equality is the first principle of Western life,
yet the superiority of refinement and mental cultivation is fully
recognised, and everybody readily defers to them. This, however, is
only done on the condition that there is no assumption on the part of
the person himself. To pretend to a superiority to others,—what we
call, to give yourself airs,—is in American society, whether it be in
the East or the West, an unpardonable offence; it is the sin against
equality, which is never forgiven in this world, and which every true
American trusts will not be forgotten in the next. Only leave it to
them to discover your merits, and you will have no reason to complain
of want of appreciation. They are a people who measure others much more
fairly than we do.

[Sidenote: _From Shyenne to Denver._]

The track from Shyenne to Denver lies along the foot of the mountains,
and is about one hundred and ten miles in length. On your left is the
boundless plain; on your right are the mountains, rising suddenly like
a wall out of the plain. The first range is either scantily clothed
with pine forests, or shows only the naked dark-coloured rock. Behind
and above this is the snowy dividing ridge, which, however, in summer
and autumn, has snow only on its highest peaks. In some places the
lower range is of a bright red, as if the mountain were faced with red
brick. From the picturesque point of view, the defect of the mountains
is that they keep too much to the straight line. This is not observed
when you get among them, but it is very perceptible from the plain,
into which no outlying hills, or spurs, obtrude on this route. St.
Vrain and Burlington are the most important places you pass. Each of
them appears to have a population of three or four hundred souls: they
are only separated from each other by a stream. But it is sufficient
to render the land on its banks capable of cultivation; and this, in
a region where there is so little land that can be made to produce
anything except prairie grass, is sufficient to account for the
existence of the two places. The other cities along the route are only
wooden public-houses, where the coach changes horses, and at some of
which it is arranged that the passengers shall have something to eat.
It is to the credit of the landlords of these cities on the plains,
that what they provide for their guests is good of its kind, which
cannot be said of any one of the purveyors for the five hundred miles
of railway between Shyenne and Omaha. At St. Vrain the outer range
sinks so low that you are able to look into the valleys of the snowy
dividing ridge. Fortunately, in the midst of this exposed part stands
Long’s Peak, the highest point of the chain. As seen from the plain,
it appears to be a three-peaked mountain, and each of its three peaks
has the appearance of being accessible. On enquiry at St. Vrain, I was
told that there was a good path for pedestrians, and even for mules,
to the foot of the mountain, and that it had been frequently scaled.
The mountain to the south of Long’s Peak appears to have a precipitous
face of some thousands of feet on its side towards the Peak; and there
is distinctly visible, lying between the two, a green park. A park in
the language of the mountains is a large expanse of level grass-clad
land up among the hills. There are many of them in this range. They
are always well watered, and abundantly stocked with game. This park
and this peak are, by the path I have just mentioned, forty-five miles
distant from St. Vrain. The depression of the outer hills which admits
them to view continues for about twelve miles.




CHAPTER XVI.

 THE CITY OF DENVER—THE LADIES GIVE A BALL—MANNERS OF DENVER—‘QUITE
 OUR FINEST GENTLEMAN’—THE PLAINS WILL BE TO AMERICA AN IMPROVED
 AUSTRALIA—THE ADVANTAGES THEY OFFER FOR FLOCKS AND HERDS—WILL SOON BE
 CLEAR OF INDIANS—MARKETS NOW OPENED TO THEM—SIZE OF THE RUNS—WEALTH OF
 THE REGION.


[Sidenote: _The City of Denver._]

I expressed some of the surprise I felt at finding a place like Omaha,
500 miles beyond Chicago. But here, at Denver, is a busy, thriving
town, 600 miles beyond Omaha. It has almost completed its transition
from wood to brick. The stores and offices are now nearly all of the
latter material. So is the new church of the Methodists, which besides
has stained glass windows. In the church of the Episcopalians, the
primitive wood still maintains its ground in the greater part of the
building. The finest structure in the place is a seminary for young
ladies, which has just been erected by Bishop Randall. The Methodists
have a large seminary of the same kind, but externally it is very
inferior to the Bishop’s. The United States Government has also a Mint
here, for the gold and silver extracted from the mountains. I inspected
in the town three common schools; two for whites, one for boys, one for
girls, and one for coloured people of any age; for I saw several adults
in the room, seated on the same benches as the children. Denver, as
far as I could judge, is well provided with everything. On enquiry,
I found that a haunch of antelope venison sold for seventy-five
cents—about half-a-crown of our money. The mountains are close upon the
town, and present a view that is very grand. Golden City, which is in a
gap of the first range, is distant from Denver only ten miles.

In so new and remote a place one would not expect to find everything,
in the way of manners and customs, moving on precisely in the grooves
of the Old World. For instance, I was just too late for a ball which
the ladies of Denver, availing themselves of the fact that it was
leap-year, had given to the gentlemen. It had been, I understood,
a lively affair and a great success. The ladies selected their own
partners (one, however, has heard of other instances of this), and took
the gentlemen in to supper. As in all new settlements the fair sex must
always be in a minority, some of the gentlemen must on this occasion
have learnt, ‘with pangs unfelt before, unpitied and alone,’ what it is
to be a ball-room wall-flower.

I arrived at Denver at 4 A.M. A few hours afterwards, as I was passing
the door of the drawing-room of the hotel, a gentleman I had never seen
before came out to meet me, and, conducting a lady up to me, requested
me to take her down to breakfast. I afterwards became acquainted
with this gentleman, and found that he was an ex-judge, who on the
expiration of his term of office had resumed his practice at the bar.

[Sidenote: _‘Quite our Finest Gentleman.’_]

When breakfast was over, the manager of the hotel invited me to
accompany him up stairs to the ladies’ drawing-room, that he might
introduce me to the mistress of the house and some other ladies whom I
should find sitting with her.

These ceremonies having been got through, I took a letter of
introduction to the editor of the local news department of one of the
Denver dailies. With the overflowing good-nature of his countrymen, he
immediately placed himself at my service, showing me over the town,
and introducing me to its notabilities. Hospitality here is plainly
the order of the day; for wherever we went, invitations of one kind
or another were immediately given. In a place like Denver, where even
the tradition of social inequalities has been lost, and the idea and
practice of equality that rule society have, in their passage across
the continent, been distilled and redistilled a hundred times, you
find the article in its purest possible form; men are valued only
according to their personal qualities, such as their cleverness, their
_bonhomie_, and their ability to make money. I give this as a preface
to my Denver cicerone’s description of one of the persons to whom he
was about to introduce me. ‘You must now,’ he said, ‘let me take you to
Mr. A. He is quite our finest gentleman.’ I had not had many minutes’
conversation with ‘quite the finest gentleman in Denver,’ before I
had reason for coinciding with the estimate of his fellow-townsmen;
for among other offers of assistance and hospitality, he had given
me an invitation to be his companion and guest in a long tour he was
about to make in the mountains, but which, he explained, would on his
part combine business with exploration and pleasure. Of course it is
inconceivable that there could be any gentleman in Denver who was
not in some kind of business, and ‘quite the finest gentleman’ of the
place happened to be a grocer. But what of that? So is the senator for
the State of New York; and Denver grocers can and do possess many of
the personal qualities of gentlemen, though it may be supposed they
are quite unconscious of the sense in which Charles II. used the word,
when he replied to his foster-mother’s request that he would make his
foster-brother a gentleman, ‘that he could make him a lord, but that
God Almighty could not make him a gentleman.’ Meaning that the being,
or the not being a gentleman, was a matter of birth, and of birth only.

One who has seen anything of these enormous plains, cannot but
speculate on their future. I came to the conclusion that in a few years
they will be the Australia of North America. And as their soil and
climate are very much better, they will support, at a far cheaper rate,
a much greater number of millions of sheep and cattle. In the Valley
of the Platte, for 500 miles, and down as far as Denver, though the
climate is too dry for agricultural purposes, still the herbage is so
abundant and nutritious that even in winter, when it is all dried up
into the form of natural hay, herds of cattle are turned out to fatten
upon it, which they do readily, without any shelter or any help from
artificial food.

[Sidenote: _The Australia of America._]

As you go further south, you get some regions still better adapted
to grazing and sheep-farming, and some not so good, till you come to
Texas, in which enormous numbers of horned cattle are raised already.
That Nature does of herself supply everything that is needed, is proved
by this having been the home of the buffalo, which has ever been
covering these plains with numbers beyond belief. It becomes, then,
a kind of rule of three sum: if Nature, unaided, supported without
fail so many millions of large herbivorous animals, how many more will
she support when aided by the care and forethought of man? Convert
in your mind these countless herds of buffalo into sheep and oxen,
and then multiply the result twenty fold, for that amount may easily
be reached, when American flock-masters and herd-masters shall have
taken possession of the plains, and parcelled them out into manageable
ranches, turning the whole of the surface to account.

There are a great many streams, small and great, which carry the
drainage of the mountains across these plains to the Mississippi; and
in places where there are no streams, water may be obtained by sinking
wells. Wherever I went I made enquiries on this subject, and looked
myself into the wells; and I found that water was reached in the Valley
of the Platte, and on the plains from Shyenne to Denver, at a depth of
about thirty feet. Water for the stock might be pumped from such wells
by horse-engines or wind-mills.

In the northern part of the plains, in most winters there is a short
spell of very severe cold, and it is possible that the ground may
for several days continuously be covered with snow. Both of these
difficulties may be met. The first by enclosures that will keep the
cold wind from the stock, the walls being of wood, or of wood and
adobe, or of any material that is the cheapest on the spot; and the
second, by laying up a store of prairie hay. This is already done by
Wells, Fargo, and Company, on these very plains, for the purpose of
supplying provender for the horses of their numerous coaches. They
have it cut by the hay-cutting machine that is getting into use in
this country. The prairie hay looks hard and coarse, but in reality is
of very good quality, and has the great advantage that it will keep
for many years; so that what is cut this summer, if on account of the
openness of the season it be not needed in the ensuing winter, will
stand over for another year; in fact, it will remain good till it is
wanted.

Heretofore there have been two hindrances to stock-keeping on the
plains—the Indians, and the want of a market. Both of these are now in
course of removal. In a year or two the Indians to the north of Shyenne
and Denver will have ceased to give any more trouble. To the south of
Denver they have already been cleared off to a considerable distance.
With them, indeed, everywhere throughout the plains, as it has been
with them all the way up from the Atlantic coast, their disappearance
will only be a question of time. And the time is now at hand, for the
white man has begun to settle on the plains, and the two races cannot
exist together in the same region. And as to the want of a market,
that deficiency is being removed by the peopling of the Valley of the
Mississippi, and by the advance into the plains of the two branches
of the Pacific railway. These lines will carry mutton and beef to the
Eastern States, at a lower figure than that at which they can grow the
meat themselves. They will also carry away the tallow, hides, bones,
and wool. In the Eastern and Northern States stock has to be kept all
the winter on corn and artificial food, while here on the plains its
keep costs nothing, for it can be fattened very well for market on
the natural grasses. What, therefore, the wheat-growing States of the
North-west have done for those who were formerly the wheat-growers of
the East, these States on the plains will do for those who are now the
meat-growers of the East.

There will be this great difference between farming and
stock-keeping—that is, between the proprietors of arable land in the
old States, and the flock and herd masters of the plains—that it is
impossible to farm on a large scale; it has, with exceptions hardly
worth noticing, been so throughout the Union, a farmer seldom getting
beyond what he can manage with his own hands and the assistance of his
family; but here just the reverse will be the only thing possible. It
will be here as it has been in Australia: a man cannot keep a few head
of cattle, or a few hundred sheep. To make it pay, indeed, to keep his
animals alive, he must have a large tract of land, and do the thing on
a large scale. We hear of paddocks in Australia thirty miles square. I
suppose on the plains a third of this size will be a sufficiently large
run, and a much more profitable one.

As the tide of population has now reached the plains on their eastern
side, and in some degree on the western and northern sides also, and
as many have already got a footing upon them, I suppose, judging
from the rapidity with which everything that pays is carried out in
America, that in a few years this enormous district, twice as large
as France, will be occupied, and by a class of men such as the Union
does not now possess. They will be very numerous and very wealthy—quite
the wealthiest class in the Union; and even if there is to be no
resurrection for the South, which it is impossible to believe, they
will compensate, speaking from the wealth-of-nations point of view,
for its loss. I have seen some of the pioneers of the class, and,
prophesying of those who are to follow, from the way in which the
influences of the Plain have shaped those who have already come, I
would say that they will be characterised by hardihood, generosity, and
manliness. They will occupy with their flocks and herds a great part
of Texas on the south, and of Nebraska on the north, with the whole of
Arizona, Colorado, and New Mexico. This region will, like Australia
and the districts of the La Plata, export enormous quantities of wool,
tallow, and hides. But they will have a mighty advantage over those
two great stock-keeping regions, that they will not be themselves the
only consumers of their beef and mutton, but will have customers for
as much as they can produce, in the inhabitants of a rich and populous
continent, of which they will be the centre. In this way is some
new source of wealth, and always on the grandest scale, ever being
developed in the United States.




CHAPTER XVII.

 THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS—GOLDEN CITY—GOLDEN GATES—MINING TOWNS—NEIGHBOURING
 MOUNTAINS STRIPPED OF EVERY TREE—WHAT GROWS ON THE MOUNTAINS—AMERICAN
 HORSES—ROADS AND BRIDGES THEY HAVE TO PASS—HOW, SIX-IN-HAND, WE WENT
 DOWN A HILL SIDE IN THE MOUNTAINS—A NICE DISTINCTION AS TO ACCIDENTS
 ON THIS HILL—CLIMATE-WIND-STORMS—BIRDS—DOGS.

[Sidenote: _The Rocky Mountains._]

I entered the Rocky Mountains at a place called Golden City. It lies in
a gap of the first range. Till lately it was the capital of Colorado,
which honour has now been transferred to Denver. It is chiefly of
brick—the proof, in this part of the world, of mature age in a town.
I counted three churches in the place; the best of the three belongs,
as I was told, to the Episcopalians. The population appeared to be
about three thousand. A thick seam of good coal is exposed just at the
foot of the hill close to the town. I had heard that I should find a
place of this name, but I was not at all prepared for the brick, and
the churches, and the population. There is a good hotel here, kept by
an Englishman; but, judging from those I fell in with, the well-to-do
people of the place were mostly New Englanders.

Just beyond Golden City the road passes through a grand defile, between
precipitous mountains of dark rock; this, as it leads to the auriferous
regions up in the mountains, is called the Golden Gates.

Up in the mountains I visited the three mining towns of Black Hawk,
Central City, and Nevada. The district to which these towns belong had
a population of fifteen thousand persons engaged in mining, but I found
several of the mills not at work, and was told that the population
had lately fallen off considerably. In the neighbourhood of these
towns all the timber has been cut down for building and mining; and
as everything that would burn has also been cleared off for fuel,
every accessible mountain has been made as bare as a ploughed field.
Their sides are covered with what appear to be gigantic mole-hills,
but which in reality are the heaps of earth the miners have thrown up
in prospecting—that is, examining the ground for auriferous veins,
which is done by digging holes ten or twelve feet deep. It will be a
long time before the forest appears again, for at this altitude it was
composed entirely of pine, and I could nowhere, on exposed places,
find any young trees: I could find plenty of little seedlings, but
they all were dead or dying, I supposed from their inability to bear
without protection the wind, or the cold, or the drought. I saw some
magnificent trees of, I believe, a kind of spruce, and a kind of
silver fir, on the hills, from which it would have been difficult to
have removed them if cut down. They were of great height, and very
straight, though of course nothing like what we hear of as growing on
the western slopes, and down to the Pacific coast. On the lower hills I
saw abundance of a white-barked poplar, of a kind of alder, of birch,
and of willow. Gooseberry bushes in places covered the ground. I heard
that currants, raspberries, blueberries, and some other small edible
fruit were to be found in equal plenty. I saw large spaces on the hill
sides, where the undergrowth was chiefly Berberis aquifolium. In the
valleys of the outer ranges there was a great deal of the small cactus
I had seen in the plains, clothing the surface for miles together. This
species must be capable of bearing very severe cold, for 20° below zero
is a point that is occasionally reached here.

[Sidenote: _American Horses._]

American horses are, speaking generally, better than ours. Their
average character is higher. Though we probably in most classes have
some animals that are more showy, and even better adapted to their
work, yet certainly they have fewer poor brutes. With us everything
that is in the form of a horse fetches money, from the stylish pair
which everybody notices in the Park, down to the costermonger’s pony.
Manifestly inferior animals do not appear to be bred at all in America.
There is a point they do not fall below, and that point admits of bone
and blood enough to be noticed.

Their horses have another merit also. As a general rule, they do just
what is required of them, and nothing more. It is rare to see one
that jibs, or shies, or stumbles, or misbehaves himself in any way. I
cannot say whether it is that, being sounder in body, they are sounder
also in mind; or whether it is to be attributed to some superiority in
the American method of breaking in their horses; or whether the moral
effects of maize are superior to those of oats; though indeed I see
from the returns that in some parts of the country a large quantity of
the latter kind of grain is raised.

As American drivers have more confidence in themselves and their
fortune than any drivers in the world, and are ready at any moment
to run any risks, this rationality and docility of their horses is a
valuable quality. One frequently does not know which to admire most,
the skill and nerve of the driver, or the intelligence and training of
the horses. In passing over the plains you find that only some of the
streams are bridged. The bridges, however, appear to one who is new to
the country to be very inadequate to what is required of them. They
generally consist of two long pine trees laid from bank to bank, or, if
the stream is wide, from pier to pier, and then covered with a corduroy
of cross pieces, sometimes a little dressed; the interstices are filled
up with prairie hay, which is strewed over the whole structure. To save
material and cartage, these bridges are made just wide enough for the
wheels of the coach. I do not think there could have been a foot to
spare on either side. There is no side railing of any kind. The driver,
with four or six horses as it may happen, generally takes them at his
best pace. Any hesitation, or a false step, or any kind of misconduct
in any of the horses, would lead to a mishap. But then, mishaps never
occur, or only so seldom as just to show that such things are not
impossible. This, however, is a momentary affair, and by the time
that one has noticed that the cross pieces are not fastened, but are
starting and dancing under the feet of the horses and the wheels of the
coach, the other side is reached.

[Sidenote: _Six-in-hand through the Mountains._]

In the mountains I saw a specimen of American driving that would have
astonished our old stagers of the Exeter, or the north road. We were
crossing one of the inner ranges, and had been slowly toiling up a
long hill, at a rate I suppose of not more than four miles an hour.
At last we reached the summit of almost naked rock. The descent on
the opposite side was very rapid—seven hundred feet in little more
than half a mile. This has been accomplished by a series of zigzags
constructed on the face of the hill, in the rudest possible way. The
trunks of pine trees were laid longitudinally on what was to be the
outside of the road. On the inner side some of the rock was picked down
and blasted, and laid on the pine trees; and thus a road was made, as
in the case of the bridges I have mentioned, to a very little greater
width than that of the coach. The zigzags were short, and consequently
the angles were close together. In the middle of the roadway the rock
everywhere obtruded to a height sometimes of five or six inches. Any
other people would have made the road more carefully, and of more
durable materials, in the worst places would have put some kind of
parapet to it, and would probably have used mules for the coach,
making those sure-footed animals walk down the hill. But an American
would consider it insufferable that the safety of the public should
be ensured at a loss of a few minutes’ time daily, and that a dollar
more than was absolutely necessary should be spent on a road which
might in a year or two be superseded by something better, or not wanted
at all. And so the way they manage it is to construct a road of the
narrow scantling and in the rude fashion I have mentioned, and then to
drive down it, with six fine horses, at a rate of not less than eleven
miles an hour. As soon as we got to the top of the hill, the horses
were put under the whip, and away we went. As we turned the corners at
full speed the team appeared to be coming back on the coach; and as we
rattled down the inclines the sides of the hill looked like precipices.
If one horse had stumbled on the pieces of rock projecting through the
road, or got frightened, or become unruly in any way, or if a piece of
harness had broken, or the brake had given way, a capsize would have
been inevitable, and we should have rolled over to the valley beneath.

There was an hotel at the bottom of the hill, and while we sat down to
dinner (I think people must sometimes arrive at the hotel without much
appetite), another team was put in for another stage, through ravines
and along the edges of precipices, which would require American horses
and American driving.

The hill we had just come down is called the Guy Hill. At Central City,
where I was staying the next day, I asked the landlord of the hotel if
anyone had been killed lately on the Guy Hill. ‘No,’ he replied, ‘no
one had been killed, he was glad to say, for two or three years, but
every year several persons had died of accidents on the hill.’ These
accidents happen when snow is on the ground, and the horses cannot
see their way, or when it is covered with ice, and they cannot get a
foothold. I afterwards walked up this road, and a closer acquaintance
with it only increased the respect the way in which I had been brought
down it had made me feel for American horses, drivers, and coaches. I
also went over the old road that had preceded it, and which was nothing
but a gully of smooth rock down the side of the hill. I was unable to
conceive how any vehicle could ever have been got up it or down it.

[Sidenote: _Climate in the Mountains._]

The fame of these American whips is not confined to their own country;
for I am told by an Australian friend, that in that part of the world
it is the custom to engage the services of one of them where the roads
are unusually difficult.

Though it was February when I was in the mountains, the climate was so
bright and warm, that it did not appear strange to see the gold-washers
at work in slush and water. And yet there had been so severe a frost in
the previous month, that the gulch was still thickly frozen over, and
these hardy men had to break through the ice to get water for washing
the dirt in which the gold is found. But though there is here a great
deal of open fine weather in winter, yet at this season very severe
frost, though generally of short duration, may be expected, and also
extremely violent storms of wind, often accompanied with snow. A storm
of this kind drove me out of the mountains, as I was afraid, which
actually did happen, that it would bring enough snow to block the roads
for some days. I made a run for the plains, and when I reached them, I
found the storm still raging, and saw the dust it raised looking like
a dark haze several yards high. As the wind blew from the mountains,
I did not suffer much inconvenience in running before it for twelve
miles, till I reached shelter. But the next day, when it was over, I
saw teamsters who told me that they had found it impossible to move on
across it, and that they had been obliged to anchor their waggons to
moorings driven firmly into the ground, sheltering their cattle and
themselves on the lee-side. These wind storms on the plains are not so
bad for man as for beast, for the nostrils, mouths, and eyes of the
horses and bullocks suffer much from the sharp sand.

Three species of the crow tribe are, I found, common by the road side
in the mountains in winter: the blue jay, which is seen frequently
in flocks; the magpie, which is marked very similarly to our own—it
appears, however, to be a somewhat larger bird, and to have a larger
tail; and the raven. In the summer, as there is then an inexhaustible
supply of small fruit of different kinds in the valleys, and on the
hill sides, I should expect to see a great variety of birds.

Almost in every house I entered in the mountains and in the contiguous
plains I found an enormous dog. Some were pure mastiffs; others of
mixed breed, in which the Newfoundland blood predominated. The mastiffs
were larger and more powerful animals than I ever saw at dog-shows in
London or elsewhere. Their size, however, imparted no air of nobility
to their appearance and bearing, but much of savage brutality. The
motive, I suppose, for keeping these Cerberuses is protection from
wolves, and from the two-legged assailants of life and property.




CHAPTER XVIII.

 ROCKY MOUNTAINS A FIELD FOR SPORTING—GREAT VARIETY AND ABUNDANCE OF
 GAME—WILD FRUIT—EXCELLENCE OF CLIMATE IN THE SHOOTING SEASON—HOW THE
 MOUNTAINS MAY BE REACHED, AND HOW MUCH SEEN BY THE WAY, IN 15 DAYS
 FROM LIVERPOOL—COST OF THE EXPEDITION—THE BEST CAMPING-GROUND IS THE
 SOUTH PARK, AT FOOT OF PIKE’S PEAK—THE ROUTE BY CHICAGO AND DENVER
 RECOMMENDED—OTHER ROUTE BY ST. LOUIS AND LEAVENWORTH—ROUTE INTO THE
 PARK—THE NORTH PARK EASIER WORK—THE MORE ENTERPRISING MAY GO TO
 LARAMIE PLAINS—WILL DETERIORATE EVERY YEAR.

[Sidenote: _A Field for Sporting._]

The Rocky Mountains are just at present the best sporting-ground
in the world. They have both feathered and four-footed game, and
fishing sufficient to satisfy the keenest sportsman. I saw the herds
of antelope running about like flocks of sheep. The elk is very
abundant. A few mountain buffalos are to be had: it is a smaller and
darker-coloured variety than that of the plains, and plenty of what is
here called the mountain rabbit, but which is larger than our hare,
and in winter, when I saw it, is nearly white. A bear may occasionally
be met with. The Rocky Mountain sheep is so rare that it must not be
taken into the account. Among vermin there is the wolf, a brute that
will sometimes attack a man. As he sneaks off he looks like a lean and
smoke-begrimed sheep. There is also the cayotte, a smaller animal,
about the size of a jackal, and which makes itself heard a great deal
at night.

As to the feathered game; on lucky days you may get a wild turkey, and
every day you will find plenty of prairie fowl, and quail in still
greater abundance.

The fishing will be confined to the speckled trout; but this is to be
had in any quantity you choose to take out of the water; and wherever
you may be camping out on the mountains, you will always be on the
banks of a stream, or have one near you.

Incredible quantities of small edible fruit are to be found everywhere.
They consist of gooseberries, currants, raspberries, blueberries,
and some other kinds, all of them being called collectively, in the
language of the mountains, berries. I mention them here, because, when
people are camping out, they supply materials for tarts and puddings,
and, if it be required, for dessert.

The next question to that of game is the climate. It is just the most
perfect in the world. In the months of July, August, and September,
the three best for sporting in the Rocky Mountains, it is never known
to rain. This is the experience of the people of Denver, of the mining
districts in the mountains, and of many generations of trappers. And
up on this high ground it is, at this season of the year, neither too
hot nor too cold, but just what one would desire. It is indeed so
pleasant, that it is the common practice of the people in the mountains
and contiguous plains to camp out, as it is called, in the dry months;
and the weather is so certain, that in these camping-out excursions
the ladies accompany the gentlemen. The guns and fishing-rods of the
latter supply the larder, while the former preside over the _cuisine_.

[Sidenote: _A Memorable Fortnight._]

But how are people to get from the other side of the Atlantic to
this sporting-ground, so grand in scenery, so rich in game, and so
delightful in climate? Nothing can be easier. On the fifteenth day
after leaving Liverpool you may dine in the Rocky Mountains on trout
you have yourself caught, venison you have yourself stalked, and
fruit you have yourself gathered. And could a fortnight be spent more
delightfully? It would be a memorable fortnight in any man’s life.
It would include a voyage across the great ocean; a sight of New
York and Chicago; a view of the lakes Erie and Michigan; the passage
of the Mississippi and Missouri; five hundred miles of prairie, and
as many more of the plains up the valley of the Platte; and the
Rocky Mountains, a worthy finale of the whole. Instead, then, of the
getting to the mountains being a difficulty, or any kind of obstacle
to carrying out the plan, it is, if rightly considered, one of the
greatest possible inducements for going. I suppose no other part of the
world could in the same space and time present so many grand and moving
sights; indeed, what greater sights are there in the world, except that
there are some loftier mountain ranges?

The voyage across the Atlantic may be set down at that time of the year
at eleven days. The trains take two days in going from New York to
Chicago, and as many more in going from Chicago to the mountains.

As to the cost, the fare by the Cunard boats is about 25_l._: it may be
reduced to 20_l._ by the Inman line. From New York to Chicago there
are two lines of railway; the ticket of one line costs twenty-two,
and of the other twenty-five dollars; each charges eight dollars for
a berth in a sleeping-car for the two nights, which gives one also a
sofa to one’s self in the day time. From Chicago to the mountains I
cannot say what is precisely the fare, for I took a through ticket
to Denver, which included one hundred and ten miles of coaching; I
believe, however, that it is about forty dollars, which is a high fare
for America. The fare by the steamer includes one’s board. The cost,
therefore, of actually reaching the mountains from Liverpool would be
31_l._, plus your keep during the four days you are passing from New
York to Shyenne, which would not amount to more than four dollars a
day, or sixteen in all, that is, about 2_l._ 10_s._ The whole cost,
therefore, of getting to the mountains would not be more than 35_l._

We may compare this with the alternative of taking a moor in Scotland.
Out and home would cost 70_l._ If one did the thing well, and went
to the best ground, it would be necessary to get, at Denver or
Leavenworth, a span of good mules, with harness, and a double tilted
waggon, fitted up with boxes that just pack close together, each in its
own place. This, complete in everything, would cost about 600 dollars,
or rather less than 100_l._ After three months’ use it would sell for
80_l._; because then the freighting season would be drawing to a close,
and mules and waggon would not be much in request. The mules and waggon
would thus cost 20_l._ Add to this the cost of a man to do the cooking
and look after the mules. I suppose his services might be had for
his board and a dollar a day. This, for ten weeks, would be seventy
dollars for wages—say 100 dollars in all, or 16_l._ This gives, with
the loss on the waggon and mules, 36_l._, which, divided among three
persons, the number the party would probably consist of, would add, in
the case of each, 12_l._ more to the 70_l._, bringing it up to 82_l._
For getting from Shyenne to Denver by coach, and by waggon from Denver
to the camping-ground, for flour, whisky, sugar, and other sundries,
reckon 18_l._ per head. The whole will thus be just 100_l._ But take
50_l._ more in your pocket for contingencies, and to enable you to see
a little of the country on your way out, or on your return, and you
will have had a season in the Rocky Mountains which will not have cost
you so much as it would have done to have hired a moor and forest in
Scotland, and paid a parcel of gillies, and kept house besides for two
or three months; and you will have killed twenty times as much game,
and had much more varied and interesting sport, and have had the choice
of a district larger than the whole of Scotland, and seen some of the
greatest sights the world has to show.

[Sidenote: _What it Costs._]

The best camping and sporting ground is a main point in the question.
The South Park combines every advantage. The weather is sure to be
good. There is plenty of grass, of water, and of game; and there are no
Indians or mosquitoes: for though the latter are found on the ridges
round the park, they are not found in the park itself. It is somewhere
about twenty miles square. It contains also two small settlements,
called Colorado City and Canon (pronounced Canyon) City. The topography
is not given accurately in Appleton’s maps; for instance, Pike’s
Peak, at the foot of which it lies, is represented as standing out on
the plain quite detached, whereas it is only the highest peak in that
part of the range. It is so much higher that from the neighbourhood of
Denver it is the only point visible in that direction, and so becomes
the steering mark for parties bound for the South Park. Colorado City
is also put to the north of the peak, whereas it lies to the west of it.

There are two routes to the South Park, one by way of New York, south
shore of lake Erie, Chicago, Omaha and Shyenne by railway: this is
about 2200 miles; then to Denver by coach, which is 110 miles more;
concluding with a waggon journey to the park, of about 75 miles. This
is the route I would recommend for several reasons. There is far more
to see upon it, and it can be done in less time. Instead of merely
coming down to the mountains on a line at right angles to them, you
would coast along them for nearly two hundred miles. Yon would pass
close under Long’s Peak, and through a very interesting part of the
plain, in the neighbourhood of St. Vrain and Burlington. You might
stop, if you pleased, for a day or two’s fishing at La Porte and Big
Thomson. You would see Denver, which is a place of much interest, and a
good place for getting your waggon, mules, and stores, and the man to
act as cook and waggoner, and where you would find everyone ready to be
helpful in giving information and advice.

[Sidenote: _Routes and Sporting-grounds._]

Or you might reach it in another way, by New York, Harrisburg,
Pittsburg, Cincinnati, St. Louis, and the south branch of the
Pacific Railway, which is now opened from St. Louis, by Kansas
City, Leavenworth, and Lecompton, to a point called Pond Creek. By
this route you would have to get your waggon and span of mules at
Leavenworth, and would reach Pike’s Peak and the South Park by the
Smoky Hill track. In this way you would have to travel a great deal
further by waggon; and though you would pass through a very interesting
country, and see many stirring and busy places, yet in these respects
it cannot compete with the more northerly route. Why, to have seen
Chicago is in itself an education.

Whether you go by the Denver or the Leavenworth route, the best way of
getting into the South Park is to strike the Arkansas River, and follow
it up till you enter the park, in which you will find the head waters
both of this river and of the Platte, separated by a divide of only
five miles.

Or if you wish for something easier than the South Park, and which
would enable you to dispense with waggon, mules, and a man of your own,
you might take the North Park at the foot of Long’s Peak. There is a
good path to it from St. Vrain and Burlington, of forty-five miles;
and I have no doubt but that, at the right season, you might find some
gentleman, or some party, going up into the mountains for some little
camping out, and who would be glad of your company. There is good
shooting and fishing about Long’s Peak, and you can see from the plains
the grassy park at its south side.

Or if you are more adventurously disposed, you may still be suited. The
Pacific Railway is at present opened for traffic as far as Shyenne.
It is, however, completed for thirty miles further, to Forts Sanders
and Halleck. This takes you into the very heart of the mountains. I
had the offer of being carried on to this point, if I wished it, on
a construction train, and I have no doubt but that the engineer or
contractor would grant the same favour to any traveller who requested
it. This would bring you almost upon one of the most celebrated
sporting-grounds of the mountains, the Laramie Plains; or if you could
not manage it in this way, or if you take waggon and mules, it would be
better to leave the rail at Shyenne. You would then start at once from
the present terminus of the railway, and after having kept a course of
north by west for thirty or forty miles, you would find yourself on
the Laramie Plains. This is not a park among the mountains, but a vast
expanse of open table-land. One advantage you would have on this ground
is, that a detachment of the United States army is quartered up here,
and the officers are always ready to give any assistance in their power
to gentlemen who are out on the plain for sporting. What calls for more
enterprise in those who camp out on the Laramie Plains is that they
are still open to Indian raids, and that they are exposed, as might be
expected, to very violent wind-storms.

[Sidenote: _Sporting in the Rocky Mountains._]

This year of 1868 the Rocky Mountains offer a greater combination of
advantages than they have done hitherto, or ever, probably, will again.
Till the opening of the Pacific Railway last year they were not to be
got at; but their having now been rendered so easily accessible will
lead to a great deal of the game being rapidly cleared off, both by
shoals of vacation-ramblers from the old States, who will flock to them
with tents and guns, for their yearly excursion, and by the immediate
establishment of a trade in game between the mountains and the great
cities of the north and east. I suppose that never again, after this
year, will a haunch of antelope venison be retailed in Denver for
seventy-five cents.




CHAPTER XIX.

 HOTEL CARS, REAL FIRST-CLASS CARRIAGES—AN EDITOR ON HIS COUNTRYMEN’S
 KNOWLEDGE—AMERICAN GRANDILOQUENCE—OF WHOM THIS IS SAID—NECESSARY
 TO REPEAT SOME OF WHAT ONE HEARS—‘HAVE YOU SEEN OUR FOREST?’—‘THE
 PACIFIC RAILS WILL CARRY THE COMMERCE OF THE WORLD’—LARGE ACQUAINTANCE
 AMERICANS HAVE—AN AMERICAN ON LETTERS OF INTRODUCTION—NIAGARA—THE
 AMERICAN AND CANADIAN FALLS—WHAT IS IN THE MIND MAGNIFIES WHAT ONE
 SEES—THE STONE THOUGH IT HAS CHIPPED OUT—ICE-BRIDGE—HOW NIAGARA IS
 PRONOUNCED—A WEEK OF CANADIAN WEATHER—A SNOW-BOUND PARTY AT NIAGARA.


On returning from the mountains, I left Chicago for the east in an
hotel car. This kind of carriage combines a sleeping-berth with a
travelling kitchen, and supplies you by day, just as the sleeping-cars
do, with a comfortable sofa to yourself. In front of this a table may
be placed when needed, on which you can have served in a few minutes
whatever you please. In this way you may without leaving the carriage
have all your meals for a journey of a thousand miles. No objection can
be made either to the materials or to the cooking of what is supplied.
These sleeping, hotel, and English cars are not merely devices for
diminishing the inconvenience of a long journey, and enabling one to
economise time, but they also act completely as first-class carriages.
After you have paid for your ticket at one uniform price with all the
rest of the passengers, you find in the train the steward of the
sleeping-car (sometimes there is an office in the town), and pay him
so many dollars more, and secure in this way a place to yourself,
for night and day, in the special kind of car. It would give offence
to call them first-class carriages; but from what has been said it
will be understood that they do at all events incidentally supply
this advantage. And as there is also a ladies’ carriage, into which
well-dressed gentlemen are admitted, and furthermore a caboose for
negroes, emigrants, and very dirty people, in which the wound that is
inflicted on their dignity is compensated for by a reduction of the
fare, American railway trains, although they profess to put all their
passengers on a footing of democratic equality, do in fact allow them
to classify themselves.

[Sidenote: _Tall Phrases Discounted._]

Strange as it may sound, the traveller sometimes finds it difficult
to carry on an argument with an American, on account of his complete
ignorance of the subject upon which he will go on arguing; or, worse
still, from his wonderful misconceptions, for some of which he may
possibly be indebted to rural orators and rural newspapers. I was in
this way myself often reminded of what a well-known American editor
said to me—of course very much exaggerating the fact; still, however,
his remark may have some grains of truth in it, ‘that his countrymen
were, and must long continue to be, in matters out of their own
business, and beyond their own country, the most ignorant people in the
civilised world.’

Another difficulty one occasionally meets with is that you do not know
how much you are to discount from the speaker’s grand phrases, in order
to arrive at his own meaning; for it sometimes happens that the ideas
that are in his own mind are very inadequate to the language he uses to
express them. I was, for instance, for several days thrown into close
contact with a very gentlemanly, well-spoken, well-mannered merchant,
who had seen something of the world, for his business had frequently
taken him to South America and to Europe. On one occasion he astonished
me by affirming ‘that the farmers, of all classes in the United States,
possessed the finest intellects.’ Anybody else would have meant by
these words, that among them were to be found the most powerful and
most cultivated intellects—minds great in imaginative power, or in the
power of apprehending political, or speculative, or scientific truth.
But of these uses of the intellect my companion had not so much as
the germ of a conception. To nothing of this kind had his sight ever
reached. What he meant by the finest intellect was just this: a mind
capable of giving a pretty correct practical judgment on the ordinary
occurrences of daily business. At another time the same gentleman
startled me by the announcement ‘that many of the blacks were very fine
scholars.’ After a time it became evident that he had no conception of
scholarship beyond the elements of reading and writing, and the power
of keeping accounts accurately. If a man had attained to the point
of doing these things with ease, he had achieved everything; for my
companion had caught no glimpse of anything beyond.

[Sidenote: _What one may Repeat._]

No one, I suppose, will so mistake my meaning as to imagine that I
mention anecdotes of this kind with any wish to raise a laugh at the
expense of the people I travelled among. It seems almost impertinent
to remark that there are plenty of people in America who are very
well informed, and plenty of people who express their ideas with
perfect correctness. Their system, however, of equal education, and
of equal chances to all, brings a great many to the front (and small
blame to them for such a result), who—this I suppose to have been
the history of the casual fellow-traveller whose expressions I have
just repeated—never had any education but that of the common primary
schools, and never afterwards had time for reading anything but
newspapers, and never attempted to master anything except the details
of their own business. This must be the case with many. Many others,
however, there are, as is very well known, who have used what was
acquired at the common primary school as a foundation for a solid and
extensive structure of after acquisitions.

My object is to give a correct idea of America, and of the different
kinds of Americans the traveller in the United States meets with, as
they were seen by myself. If omissions are made, this object cannot
be answered, and so what I might say would convey only erroneous
conceptions. One is generally precluded from making any reference to
what he saw or heard in private houses; but there are no reasons for
silence as to what took place at tables-d’hôte, and in railway cars,
on board steam-boats, and in coaches: all this was said and done in
public. And besides, most of the people who in America make laughable
observations would, considering the point from which they started, have
had no observations at all to make, had their lot been cast on this
side the water, or anywhere else excepting in the United States.

‘Sir,’ said a gentleman to me one morning at breakfast (we were seated
together at a small table in one of the large hotels of a great city
in the Valley of the Mississippi),—‘Sir, have you seen our Forest?’
‘Sir,’ I replied, ‘for the last thousand miles and more, since I left
Richmond, I have scarcely seen anything else.’

‘Sir,’ my interrogator responded with an indignant tone, ‘I am not
speaking of the material, but of the intellectual Forest—of our
Forest—the great Forest—the grandest delineator of the sublime and
of the ridiculous in the united world.’ I afterwards found that this
grand delineator of the ridiculous was the actor Forest, who is not
unknown professionally in this country, and who was playing in the town
I was then staying at. I also found that his admirer was a dealer in
ready-made clothes, who took his meals at the hotel.

‘Sir,’ observed to me a gentleman who was sitting next to me in a car
of the Pacific Railway, ‘these rails will carry the commerce of the
world.’ I requested him to repeat his remark. I then began to reply
by saying, that I thought it not improbable that as much of what was
used for tea in the United States as was grown in China would pass over
them, when he cut me short with, ‘Sir, it is not to be expected that
strangers should understand the grandeur of our country, but these
rails will carry the commerce of the world.’ This dealer in prophecy
was also a dealer in whisky.

[Sidenote: _Letters of Introduction._]

Wherever you may be in the United States, you will not find it
difficult to obtain letters of introduction to any town in the Union.
If an American traveller were to ask an English friend at Ipswich
for introductions to Exeter, Galway, Dundee, Carlisle, and Dover, his
friend would not find it easy to comply with the request. But if the
position of the two were reversed, and the Englishman were travelling
in America, and were to ask his American friend for introductions to
half-a-dozen places in the States, far more distant from each other
than the places I have mentioned in the United Kingdom, the American
would either be able to give them himself, or would easily find friends
who could. This implies a vast difference in our social system.
Ours is a system which isolates, theirs is a system which brings
everybody in contact with everybody. One is astonished at the number
of acquaintances an American has. For one acquaintance an English
gentleman has, an American gentleman will probably have fifty or a
hundred.

I will repeat here what an American gentleman at Washington said to
me on the subject of letters of introduction. ‘We Americans,’ he
remarked, ‘are a busy people. We have not time to attend to general
introductions. We gladly do what we can, but we cannot do what costs
time. Still, however, if the letter is brought to us by one who has
ideas, and who has the power of making us feel the magnetism of his
ideas, we will give to him our time, and everything we have to give.’

Niagara is seen to advantage in a severe winter. It is impossible for
ice to accumulate in front of the Canadian fall; but as vast masses are
formed all about the American, the contrast between the two becomes
far greater and more striking than in summer. According to the
figures usually given, the American is only one third the width of the
Canadian; but this measurement gives no idea of the difference between
the two, which lies chiefly in the fact that the sheet of water which
comes over the former is so thin that it is everywhere broken, and
white with foam; while in the Canadian fall it comes over in so deep
and solid a mass, that it is green throughout the whole Horse-shoe.
It is perfectly smooth, and there is not a bubble visible upon it.
Every piece of wood that comes over seems to glide down its surface;
the water itself being so unbroken as to appear almost as if it were
stationary and had no movement in it.

I do not know any other grand object of nature where the interest felt
at the moment in what is seen is so much heightened by what is not
seen, as in these great falls. They are grand in themselves to the eye;
but how much grander does the sight become, when it is accompanied by
the thought that what you see is the collected outflow of all those
vast lakes it has been taking you so many days to steam over and along,
lakes on all of which you lost sight of the land, just as if you had
been on the ocean itself, lakes larger than European kingdoms. Here you
have before you, gliding over that precipice, all the water these great
seas, fed by a thousand streams, are unable to retain in their own
basins.

[Sidenote: _Niagara._]

And behind you, in the seven miles from Queenston, you have in the deep
perpendicular-sided trough, cut in the solid limestone rock, a measure
of the excavating power of this descending flood, which has been for
so many ages, just like a chisel in a carpenter’s hand (the Horse-shoe
fall is now a gouge), chipping out this deep and wide channel. When
one reflects on the enormous weight of the falling water, surprise is
felt at its not working at a greater rate than, as is supposed, that of
twelve inches in twelve months.

When I was at Niagara there was what is called an ‘ice bridge’ a few
yards below the falls, and which, as it requires a continuance of
severe weather for its completion, does not occur, I was told, more
frequently than once in every nine or ten years.

I stayed at an hotel on the American side of the Suspension Bridge,
which is about a mile and a half from the falls. I was there three
days, and during that time I met two Canadians who had all their lives
been in the neighbourhood of the falls, and an American in business at
the place where I was staying, who had not yet seen the great sight,
and who felt no desire to see it.

I may here mention, that if we ought to pronounce Indian names in the
Indian fashion, we shall cease to talk about the falls of Niāgăra.
It was their practice to accent not the ante-penultimate, but the
penultimate syllable. For instance, they talked of Niăgāra, and
Ontărīo. In Ohīo, and Potōmac, if they are real Indian words, the true
Indian pronunciation has been retained.

I have already mentioned that during the time I was in the United
States I never found it uncomfortably cold. Nothing, however, of this
kind could be said of my experience of the climate of Canada. The only
ferry of those I had to cross, which had become impassable on account
of the accumulations of ice, was that into Canada at Detroit. This
was a bad beginning, and by it I lost a place I had paid for in an
hotel car. We had not gone far on Canadian soil before some of the
iron-work of the engine broke, in consequence of the intense cold of
the morning. At Niagara I was detained a day by a snow-storm. It was
so violent a storm that it put an end to all traffic for twenty-four
hours. The train I had intended using was to have left at 6.30 A.M. I
struggled to the station, through the snow, that had drifted during
the night to the depth of three feet, only to find that I had come to
no purpose. During the whole of the day you could not see ten yards
before you, the snow was driving and drifting so thickly. The next
morning when I left for Toronto, the thermometer was standing at
twelve degrees below zero; on the following morning, at Toronto it was
nineteen degrees below zero. I left Toronto for the east by the first
train that had been over the rails in that direction for some days.
While I was at Kingston there came on a second gale of wind, but this
time accompanied by blinding rain, every drop of which as it fell froze
on the zero-cold ground and snow. I was staying with the Bishop of
Ontario, and was to have been taken over the schools of the place, but
the day was such that the scholars were not able to leave their homes.
This rain continued all the next day, and, being a warm rain, it at
last turned the snow, which was unusually deep, into such an amount
of slush as one must see to believe. At last, after daily delays of
many hours each, and several mishaps on the road, to be attributed to
the mismanagement of the authorities of the bankrupt Canadian railway
companies, I reached Montreal at the end of the week, when the weather
suddenly, as in its other changes during the previous part of the
week, became calm, bright, and warm. But when I mention the changes I
experienced at the close of the winter in a single week, I must not
omit an instance of unchanging persistence the weather had exhibited
during the earlier part of the same winter. There had been forty-five
days at Montreal (but I was told that there was no record of any other
equal spell of cold), during which the markings of the thermometer had
been continuously below zero. This winter, however, of 1867-68 will be
memorable for its severity. In Minnesota thirty-six degrees, and in
Wisconsin thirty-one degrees below zero had been reached.

[Sidenote: _A Snow-bound Party._]

During the day that I was detained at the Niagara Suspension Bridge
Hotel, I had the company of about a dozen other travellers, snow-bound
like myself. The storm was too violent to admit of anyone going
outside; there was, therefore, nothing for us to do, except to sit
round the stove in front of the bar and talk away the time. Everybody
contributed what he could to the general stock of amusement, by making
or repeating jokes, or telling stories and adventures, the latter,
probably, sometimes participating in the nature of the former. I was
called upon to give a detailed account of my run to the Plains and
Rocky Mountains. When every other subject was exhausted, politics of
course came up. This, as is usual, led to loud denunciations of what is
called ‘the corruption’ of all the departments of the Government. ‘But,
Sir,’ said one of the party to me, in a determined and fierce voice,
‘the darndest corruption on this side creation is that of the British
Government. You give your Cabinet ministers very little, but they all
get rich. There are plenty of people who want their help. It was this
that enabled Lord Palmerston, during his long official life, to become
so enormously wealthy. We Americans keep ourselves well posted in these
matters. We have to transact too much business with your public men not
to know what we have to do.’ This was from the politician of the party.

‘Sir,’ said another to me, ‘no man can be blamed for travelling in this
weather, because no one would stir in it unless he had a big occasion.’
The theory was plausible, but no one present acknowledged that he had
himself been drawn away from home by ‘a big occasion.’

In the evening I went into the ladies’ drawing-room. I here found one
English and two American ladies. They were all young, and all appeared
to be on their wedding tour. One of the American ladies cried herself
to sleep because her husband had left her that he might play at cards
in the gentlemen’s drawing-room. The other took her husband’s absence
for the same purpose very philosophically, consoling herself with a
kind of dominoes she called ‘muggins.’




CHAPTER XX.

 EDUCATIONAL DEPARTMENT AT TORONTO—CANADIAN ARGUMENTS AGAINST COMMON
 SCHOOLS—A CANADIAN’S OPINION ON SECULAR SCHOOLS IN ENGLAND—HOW THE
 CANADIAN’S OBJECTIONS ARE MET IN THE UNITED STATES—UPPER CANADIANS
 NOT YET A PEOPLE—ADVANTAGES POSSESSED BY UPPER CANADA—SERVICE AT THE
 ROMANIST AND ANGLICAN CATHEDRALS—UNMANNERLY BEHAVIOUR PERMITTED ON
 CANADIAN RAILWAYS—BADNESS OF THEIR CARRIAGES—WHY CANADA IS NOT ‘THE
 LAND OF FREEDOM’—YANKEE SMARTNESS IN TRAIN-DRIVING—PICTURESQUENESS OF
 VERMONT—TRAVELLING ON AMERICAN RAILWAYS NOT FATIGUING.

[Sidenote: _Educational Department at Toronto._]

At Toronto I was taken over the educational department for Upper
Canada. It is very ambitiously housed, and combines so many objects,
namely a general library, a collection and depôt of school-books and of
school apparatus, galleries of art, chiefly for copies of celebrated
pictures and pieces of sculpture, and normal schools, that I spent two
hours in going through it. On my making some observation on the cost of
the building, and of its contents, I was told that it might appear that
too much had been spent on the department, but that it had designedly
been carried out on this scale, and the building made imposing, and the
galleries added, in order to give dignity and elevation to the idea of
education in the minds of the people. A hope had been entertained that
if the normal schools were brought under the same roof, a better class
of young persons would offer themselves for the position of teachers:
this hope had not been disappointed.

The arguments and facts which are in favour of the Canadian Common
School system are to be heard at the department, the officers of which
appeared to be able and zealous men. The system, however, has been very
far from securing that unanimity which to the south of the great lakes
exists on the subject of common schools. I will state this difference
of opinion, and some of its causes, in the words of one of the leading
men in the province, used in conversation with me on the subject. He
said, ‘that throughout Upper Canada their common schools had quite
failed in winning anything at all like general approval. The Grand Jury
of Toronto have for several years past made a presentment against the
system, hanging the expression of their dissatisfaction on the peg of
their visitation and inspection of the jail. Their dissatisfaction is
shared very largely by the upper class, who pay a heavy tax for the
schools, and yet find that those for whose benefit and elevation they
were willing to be taxed do not send their children to the schools; but
that, instead of this, the well-to-do tradesmen who could very well
afford to pay for their children’s education are now provided with it,
almost gratuitously, at the expense of the community.

‘Some towns in Upper Canada, as for instance Hamilton, have all along
refused to establish common schools.

[Sidenote: _A Canadian on Common Schools._]

‘Another difficulty about the system, besides its injustice, and its
failure in its true object, is that it extinguishes private schools.
When all the schools become of one kind, competition in excellence
ceases, and everyone is content with a low standard of mediocrity.
Every master knows that, so long as he is not more inefficient than his
neighbours, his position is safe; and that his salary, which is all
that he at last cares about, will be paid him.

‘The local superintendents, who are almost universally clergymen, have
other things to attend to, and carry out their inspection in the most
perfunctory manner.

‘A cause that is doing much harm to the schools is, that everything
connected with them is rapidly falling into the hands of the
politicians. No party can now afford to forego an opportunity for
strengthening itself by electing, or procuring the election, of party
men as managers; and these again, for the same reasons, are guided in
the selection of teachers by party considerations. It is coming to
this, that no one who has to do with the management, supervision, or
teaching of schools, will be the fittest person for what he has to do,
except by accident.’

This gentleman had studied the subject of education, as well in
England as in his own country, and he gave me some of the opinions
he had formed on the religious part of the question, or rather as to
how he conceived the proposal for secular schools would affect the
Established Church, in the following words. ‘I think,’ he said, ‘the
Church will lose nothing by the absence of a Church character in the
schools. I never met with a clergyman in the old country, whether it
was an archbishop or the incumbent of a small rural parish, to whom I
put the question, who felt sure that the Church gained by the schools
being in the hands of the clergy. No one will say that this attaches
the children, when they are grown up, to the Church. For my own part,
I feel sure that a system which would rigidly exclude both all Church
and all denominational teaching would be a gain to the Church. This
is necessarily true, if under the present system Church schools do
less to indoctrinate those brought up in them with Churchism, than the
denominational schools do to indoctrinate those brought up in them
with dissent. My conclusion is, that if I were an English Churchman, I
should not vote against the plan which would supplement your existing
system with secular schools. It would do you no harm, and would give
you many intelligent members.’

[Sidenote: _Canadians not yet a People._]

The way in which my Canadian friend’s opinions about common schools
differed from those held everywhere in the United States, supplies
a means for measuring the social and moral differences of the two
peoples. Not one of the above objections, whatever weight it may
have in Canada, has any weight at all in the United States. There
the first thing thought about is making the schools as suitable as
possible for all classes, and this object is very largely attained,
so that the upper class need not, and do not, hold themselves aloof
from them. There, too, instead of noting with feelings and expressions
of discontent that a great number of the lower class in the towns do
not resort to the schools, great efforts are made to bring them in,
by varying, and adapting to their wants and habits, the character of
the schools, as is done at Boston and New York, and by getting as
many people as possible to become volunteer workers in the effort
to persuade such parents to send their children. I was, while at
Washington, very much struck and interested by the account Mr. Barnard,
the Commissioner of Education, gave me of the way in which this had
been effected. And then, as to the deadness and inefficiency which show
themselves in the public schools in Canada, as soon as competition with
private schools ceases, an American public and American parents would
not tolerate anything of the kind. And the American teachers themselves
are so energetic and ambitious, that they would be the last in the
community to succumb to such influences. The inefficient inspection the
Canadian objectors complain of is a great evil, but is very far from
being an irremediable one.

The fact is, that the inhabitants of Upper Canada are not yet a people.
They are Englishmen, Scotchmen, or Irishmen, just as if they were still
in the old country; and what would not have suited them there, they
think will not suit them where they are. Unlike their neighbours, they
are not possessed with the idea, that if they will only give themselves
the trouble to attempt it, they can make anything bear its proper
fruit. The American is the hardest worker in the world, never sparing
himself, but always toiling on, in the faith that he will soon be able
to bring all things right; and he generally succeeds in doing so. These
are not yet the characteristics of the inhabitants of Upper Canada.

In Canada there is the stage, and there are the materials for a great
nation. Its towns are more solidly built than those of the same size
in the States, possibly on account of the greater severity of the
climate. The country is generally fertile. It is also very varied, full
of lakes, and streams, and forests. It abounds in mineral wealth and
in agricultural produce. Notwithstanding its seven months’ winter, it
is capable of ripening maize and maturing tobacco; and even, to speak
of small things, through the medium of its peas, a crop which can
rarely be grown profitably to the south of the lakes, it supplies no
inconsiderable part of what is used for coffee among its neighbours.
That product, however, of Canada, which most attracts the attention of
the traveller, and is likely to make the strongest impression upon him,
is the complexion of the Canadian ladies. It gives you more of the idea
of transparency, otherwise you might have thought that it was of pearl.

On a Sunday, while at Montreal, in my way to the Episcopal cathedral of
Christ’s Church, I allowed time for witnessing the celebration of High
Mass at the church or cathedral annexed to the Jesuits’ College. As I
left the building the thought in my mind was, ‘I should like to ask the
priests who have just been officiating, if they have, or can imagine,
any reasons for believing that this service is either acceptable to God
or edifying to man?’ In the English cathedral the service was very well
and impressively read by an elderly clergyman; but the young clergyman
who afterwards occupied the pulpit was far too minutely acquainted
with all that passes in the mind of the Almighty. No man could be so
fully acquainted with what passes in the mind of his most familiar
friend—hardly with what passes in his own mind.

[Sidenote: _Canadian Railways._]

One who has just come from the States may compare the manners and
customs of the American travelling public with those of the Canadian.
The former are very much in advance of the latter. The Canadian
conductor, unlike his brother officer to the south, appears to make no
attempt to keep things and persons in order for the general advantage.
Anybody, however rough (and many Canadian travellers are in winter very
rough indeed, perhaps because they are lumberers out for a holiday),
is allowed to take his seat in the ladies’ carriage. The shaggiest and
most unmannerly fellows, sometimes with short pipes in their mouths,
and in their shirt sleeves, are permitted to perambulate the train,
staring everybody in the face; I suppose merely to show that they are
lords of the situation. But what I found the most annoying of all was,
that I hardly ever left my seat for a few moments without finding on
my return that some one had pushed my luggage and rug on one side, and
taken possession of my place. This I believe to be a practice quite
unheard of in the United States; at all events, I never noticed an
instance of it. The only case of drunkenness I ever saw in any railway
car was on the Grand Trunk line of Canada: it was that of a dirty,
uncombed rough, who was uproariously tipsy; but neither conductor nor
anyone else took any notice of him.

Again; the worst carriages in the States are better than those on
the great Canadian lines. All the former have good springs; but the
Canadians are too strongly protectionist to tolerate American cars on
their lines, and their own native cars have, as far as my experience
goes, no springs at all. A Canadian assured me that there had once been
a time when they had had springs, but that they had now stiffened or
worn out, or in some way or other gone to the bad. The effect is that
there is an incessant short, sharp, rattling jar, which becomes very
distressing. Their home-made carriages must also be very deficient in
strength, or else their rails must be most alarmingly out of order; for
in one day I counted about a dozen wrecks of trains lying by the side
of the road. This is not encouraging as one goes along and sees (the
ground being everywhere covered with snow) nothing else but overturned
and smashed-up cars.

Still, we must remember that in the great bridge over the St. Lawrence,
at Montreal, they have one of the grandest railway works in the world.
It seems to be about a mile and a half long, and carries the train over
the rapids of the St. Lawrence through a series of tubes supported by
massive stone piers.

On crossing this bridge, on my return to the States, I left behind me
on the west bank more than two feet of snow. In some places the fences
were entirely buried. On the eastern side, however, of the river the
snow was much thinner, and in less than two hours we were passing over
a country from which it had almost disappeared. This was not lost on a
voluble little Irishwoman, the chief talker in a party of Irish whom
she had been endeavouring to persuade to leave Canada and settle in
the States. ‘You see for yourselves,’ she said, pointing out to them
how much less snow there was than what they had left two hours ago in
Canada, ‘you see for yourselves that this is the land of freedom; for
here, if a body has no shoes, she can go without them: but in Canada it
is entirely too cold: faith, then, this is the land of freedom.’

[Sidenote: _American Railway Travelling._]

For the first sixty miles of this journey we remained in the execrable
carriages of the Grand Trunk of Canada Company, and in the hands of
their officials, whose way of doing things leaves on the mind the
feeling that their object is to show how what ought to be done may be
neglected. The instant the Yankees took charge of the train everything
changed, as if by magic. You could feel at any moment that the train
was being driven against time, and not allowed to go anyhow. The
smartness with which the driver brought it into the stations, and took
it out, never waiting one instant longer than was necessary for giving
up the mail-bags, or whatever it might be the conductor had to do,
showed the value he attached to the passengers’ time, and to his own
reputation for punctuality. I believe there were times when we were not
stopped for more than thirty seconds. In a long day’s journey, to feel
that the train is handled in this way has quite an exhilirating effect.

All day long we were winding our way among the hills of Vermont, which
rose above the valleys to a height of six or seven hundred feet. Every
valley had its stream. The land appeared generally to be poor; but, as
is usual in such cases, it was very picturesque.

I tried sometimes to make out why it is that five hundred miles by
railway in America do not fatigue one so much as fifty in this country.
More than once in America I travelled upwards of a thousand miles at a
single stretch, but never on any occasion, in a tour of eight thousand
miles by railway, did I feel, either during a journey or after it,
anything like fatigue or discomfort, or have any sensation to remind
me that I had travelled a single mile. The only explanation I could
hit upon was that on English and European railways you are shut up in
a little box, in which you cannot move about, and in which there are
incessant draughts from a door and window on each side of you. The
result is, that your feet instantly get cold, and cold feet affect the
whole system disagreeably. In American cars, however, from the way
in which the floors are fastened, and from there being no side doors
at all, one’s feet, with rare exceptions, even when the thermometer
outside is below zero, are as far from being chilled as they would be
in one’s own house. Of course the American cars have also a stove at
each end.




CHAPTER XXI.

 BOSTON IS THE HUB OF AMERICA—MR. TICKNOR—PROFESSOR ROGERS AND THE
 TECHNOLOGICAL—MR. NORTON—PROFESSOR AGASSIZ—MR. APPLETON AND MR.
 LONGFELLOW—MR. PHILBRICK—A GRAMMAR SCHOOL COMMEMORATION—HUMILITY OF
 THE BETTER LITERARY MEN OF BOSTON—REGRET AT LEAVING BOSTON.

[Sidenote: _Boston the Hub of America._]

Boston is the hub of the world. So say those who, not being
Massachusetts men themselves, are disposed to impute extravagant
pretensions to the good old Puritan city. The hub, in the language of
America, is the nave, or centre-piece of the wheel, from which the
spokes radiate, and on which the wheel turns. As the Americans make
with their hickory wood the best wheels in the world, they have some
right to give to one of the pieces a name of their own. But, however,
Boston need not quarrel with the saying. Nations, like individuals,
are generally governed by ideas, and no people to such a degree as
the Americans: and the ideas which have governed them hitherto, have
been supplied from New England. But Massachusetts has been the wheel
within New England, and Boston the wheel within Massachusetts. It has
therefore been the first source and fountain of the ideas that have
moved and made America, and is, in a high and honourable sense, the hub
of the New World.

Among the celebrities of Boston with whom I was so fortunate as
to become acquainted, and to see in their own houses, I will name
first Mr. Ticknor, the author of the well-known ‘History of Spanish
Literature,’ himself now the father of American literature. His
reminiscences of the history and society of his own country, and
largely too of English literary society, for the last fifty years,
contribute very much to enrich his conversation. I have a grateful
sense of his hospitality, and of the other ways in which he assisted in
making my visit to Boston most agreeable.

My next acquaintance was Professor Rogers, the head of the
Technological Institute of Boston. A great deal has been spent by
the city on the building in which this Institute is housed, and in
providing it with an able staff of professors; and it has proved
thoroughly well adapted to the teaching of all the different branches
upon which it undertakes to give instruction. These are Physics,
Chemistry, Mathematics, Mechanics, and Drawing, particularly as
required by machinists, engineers, builders, and architects. Its
objects are entirely practical; but it would be a gross mistake to
depreciate them on that account. The knowledge imparted here is
necessary for certain trades and professions; and it is better that
this knowledge should be communicated well and correctly, than that
it should be picked up imperfectly. It is better that those who
carry on any business that is based on scientific principles should
be familiar with its principles, than that they should go through
life working merely by the rule of thumb. In the programme of the
Institute Professor Rogers’s department is Physics; but in fact the
Technological Institute is Professor Rogers, and Professor Rogers (for
he is so devoted to it that it has become a part of himself) is the
Technological Institute, plus a great deal that is good, and refined,
and generous.

[Sidenote: _Literary Society at Boston._]

I spent an evening with Mr. Norton, the editor of the ‘North American
Review.’ I was much pleased with all that I saw of Boston society, but
this evening at Mr. Norton’s recurs to my recollection with especial
distinctness. He, as the editor of the leading Review of the New
World must for many years have had his finger on the literary pulse
of America, and must know better than any other person what American
writers can do, and what the American public appreciates. I was glad
to hear that Mr. Norton contemplated spending twelve months in England
with his family, though I regretted that he should find that a year
of rest and of change of climate was necessary for him. It seemed to
me, that both he and Professor Rogers were much overworked, and were
also suffering from the withering aridity of the climate. A great part
of the population of New England appears to be affected by the same
cause—their vital organs are going through a process of desiccation. I
trust that both these good and true workers in the literary society of
Boston will before long be indebted for their restoration to health and
strength to the moister and more merciful climate of the old country.

I was sorry that the shortness of my stay prevented my accepting an
invitation from Mr. and Mrs. Agassiz. They are persons of whom it is
impossible to know a little without wishing to know a great deal more.
They had lately returned from their explorations in Brazil, but more
especially in the Valley of the Amazon. The popular narrative of the
expedition (for it was composed of several persons) was written by Mrs.
Agassiz, and has just been published. The more detailed and scientific
account, by Mr. Agassiz, is eagerly expected. His character appears to
be a most singularly transparent one. He has strong social instincts.
In society he is evidently in his true element. But all the while, by
the side of this keen enjoyment of society, you see that his soul has
been constructed for making those discoveries in physical science, and
acquiring those new ideas, he has so much happiness in presenting to
the minds of others. His rich genial conversation and ready sympathies
are worthy of the high position he holds in the scientific world.

To Mr. Thomas G. Appleton—the first American, I believe, who crossed
the Atlantic in his own yacht—I am indebted for several kindnesses;
among them for his taking me to his brother-in-law, Mr. Longfellow, who
resides at Cambridge, about three miles from Boston. Mr. Longfellow’s
house is the oldest in the place, and has a good deal of curious
antique carving and panelling. This is as it should be, for one can
hardly imagine a poet living in a new, square-built, brick house,
without a tradition or association.

[Sidenote: _Young Ladies’ Recitations._]

In mentioning those whose names are public property, from whom I
received kindnesses at Boston, I must not omit Mr. Philbrick, the
Superintendent of Schools for the city. He allowed me to spend a
morning in the Poplar Street Primary School, which was quite a model
of its kind. It contained 300 children, divided into six grades.
With few exceptions, they all come at the age of five, and leave at
eight. He also took me with him to the yearly commemoration of the
Adam Street Grammar School, in a distant suburb of the city. This is
a mixed school for boys and girls, or rather for young ladies, for
some of the latter were certainly not less than eighteen years of age.
There were present on the occasion the superintendent, some assistant
superintendents, or committee-men—I forget which was their title—and
many of the parents of the children. The work consisted in recitations,
singing, and reading extracts from a periodical written by the pupils
and published in the school. The reciting was fairly done. No timidity
was shown by any young lady who ascended the platform; but there was no
boldness, or anything in any way unpleasing. There was only a degree
of easy self-possession that would have been unusual in English ladies
of any age. I mention this because the impression left on Mr. Fraser’s
mind by exhibitions of this kind appears not to have been favourable.
As soon as the business of the day was over, Mr. Philbrick, being the
chief official in the city connected with education, was called upon by
the head-master to make a speech, or, as it is called in America, to
deliver an address. After speaking for about ten minutes, he concluded
by telling the company who I was, and with whom I was acquainted in
the city, adding that he hoped I would give those present the pleasure
of hearing me say something. I was a little taken by surprise at this
summons, the heat of the room having almost put me to sleep. Otherwise
one ought always to be prepared for such requests, because in America
you may be quite sure that they will always be made. It is one of
their institutions.

One hears a great deal about what is described as the arrogance and
conceit of Americans. I never met with anything of the kind, except
among classes which with us are generally too ignorant to know much,
and too apathetic to care much about their own country. The upper
classes are proud of their country, as they ought to be, and that is
all. At Boston, however, I was struck, not with the arrogance and
conceit, but with the humility of Americans. I am speaking now of the
literary class; and I think the phenomenon is to be accounted for in
the following way. These New Englanders are the most observant and the
most receptive of the human family, and it is the first thought of all
among them who have literary aspirations to travel in England and on
the European continent. These are to them the Holy Land of thought. It
is here that all the branches of literature, and all the departments of
science, originated and were matured. All the creations of fancy, all
the lessons and examples of history, all the familiar descriptions of
outward nature, and of human emotions, come from this side. Here, then,
are the shrines which the literary men of the New World must visit
with the staff and in the spirit of a pilgrim. They feel an influence
which their fellow-countrymen do not feel. But besides this, because
they are New Englanders, they note and weigh every idea and practice
they find in European society; and everything that approves itself to
their understanding, they adopt readily and without prejudice. This is
the reason why travelled New Englanders are generally so gentlemanly
and agreeable. They understood what they saw abroad, and they have
acknowledged to themselves that they have learnt much that they never
would have known anything of if they had stayed at home. This, which
is true of all, is doubly true of their literary men. One of the
leading writers of New England described to me the craving that he
felt for intercourse with minds cultivated as they are only in Europe.
There only, in his opinion, men had time to think; there only had the
critical faculties been trained; there only could you meet with broad
and profound views on questions of literature, history, or policy. The
whole of the literature of America was but a _rechauffé_ of that of
England, France, and Germany.

[Sidenote: _Humility of the Leading Literary Men._]

I regretted the necessity which obliged me to leave Boston before I had
seen as much as I wished of its society. I did not feel in this way
because it more nearly resembles European society than is the case in
any other city of the Union—for one does not go to America to see what
can be seen at home—but because I wished to know more of some with whom
I felt that it would be a happiness afterwards to be acquainted, and
because I was desirous of using every opportunity for arriving at some
distinct conclusions as to the tendency of opinion and thought, more
particularly religious thought, in the New World.




CHAPTER XXII.

 AMERICAN HOTELS—WHY SOME PEOPLE IN AMERICA TRAVEL WITHOUT ANY
 LUGGAGE—CONVERSATION AT TABLES-D’HÔTE SHOULD BE ENCOURAGED—THE
 IRISH, THE AFRICAN, AND THE CHINESE—CAN A REPUBLIC DO WITHOUT A
 SERVILE CLASS?—WHAT WILL BE THE ULTIMATE FATE OF THESE THREE RACES IN
 AMERICA—NO CHILDREN—MOTIVES—MEANS—CONSEQUENCES—WHY MANY YOUNG MEN AND
 YOUNG WOMEN MAKE SHIPWRECK OF HAPPINESS IN AMERICA—THE COURSE MANY
 FAMILIES RUN—AMERICA THE HUB OF THE WORLD.


During the week I was at Boston, I dined for the last time in an
American hotel; for the fortnight I afterwards spent in my second visit
to New York, I passed in the hospitable house of Mr. Henry Eyre, a
brother of the Rector of Marylebone, and a worthy representative of
Englishmen in the commercial capital of America. With this exception,
at the close of my tour, I made it a rule, from which I never departed,
to decline all invitations to stay in private houses. My reason for
doing this was, that I might come and go as I pleased, and have my time
always at my own disposal. This gave me abundant opportunities, as my
travels extended over 8,000 miles of American ground, for forming an
estimate of their hotels and hotel life. With a few exceptions here
and there, in some of the large eastern cities, the hotels are on the
monster scale, and managed on the American system. The exceptions are
called English, or European hotels, and their speciality is that you
only pay in them for what you have. On the American system you pay so
much a day for board and lodging; liquors and washing being extras.
That the American system is the cheapest and most convenient, is
demonstrated by its universality. The few exceptions that exist have
to be inquired after and sought out. A traveller will also avoid them,
because he is desirous of seeing the manners and customs of the people;
and these can nowhere be seen so readily, and to such an extent, as in
the monster hotels. They are a genuine production of the soil, are in
perfect harmony with American wants and ideas, and are all alike.

[Sidenote: _American Hotels._]

Their distinguishing features are that the greater part of their
guests are not travellers, but lodgers and boarders; and that they
have one fixed charge for all, of so many dollars a day. The dearest
I entered was the Fifth Avenue Hotel at New York, which charged five
dollars a day; the board consisting of five such meals as no hotel in
England or Europe could supply without bankruptcy. They are enabled to
do this, because they have to supply these meals for several hundred
persons. And they have this large number of guests, because multitudes
of families, that they may escape the expense and annoyances of
house-keeping, live in the hotels, and multitudes of men in business,
keeping only a counting-house or a store in the city, do the same.
The cheapest I was ever in charged three dollars and a half a-day.
The service is so well organised in these hotels, that you may come
or go at any hour of the night; and you can get your linen washed and
returned to your room in a few hours. While dressing one morning at
the Sherman House at Chicago, I sent out my linen to the laundry; on
going back to my room at half-past eleven, I found that it had been
washed and returned. This rapidity with which the washing of linen is
performed in America enables one to travel with much less than would
be requisite in Europe; and it explains why one often sees people
travelling in America with no more than they can carry in a little
hand-bag, called, in the language of the country, a satchel.

It does not, however, explain why some people in America travel with
no luggage at all. Some of those whom I observed entering and leaving
the cars in this light and unimpeded fashion, told me they had adopted
the system because the work of the washerwoman had been advancing among
them, not more in rapidity than it had done in costliness, so that it
was now cheaper to get a new article, something at the same time being
allowed for the old soiled one, than to send one of the same species
to the laundry of the hotel. By acting on this idea they had escaped
the necessity of taking with them relays of linen. I suppose this
system must be an encouragement to the trade in paper shirt-collars.
The difficulty as to razors, brushes, and combs, is easily met by the
provision made in the barber’s shop of every hotel. The Americans
are full of original ideas, and they are very great travellers; it
was therefore to be expected that they would be the first people to
organise and perfect a system of travelling like the birds of the air.

[Sidenote: _Conversation at Meals._]

The Americans having now revolutionised throughout the whole country
the method of serving hotel dinners, passing at one step from what was
the worst method of all to what is greatly in advance of the practice
in this matter of all other nations, I would venture to suggest
another change in a matter of still greater importance. It is evident
that civilisation would have been quite an impossibility, if people
had not met together at meals for the purpose of conversation. This
alone rescues the act of taking one’s food from its animal character,
and associates it with the exercise of our moral and intellectual
qualities. If we do not meet together, and converse, and exchange
thought, and cultivate courtesies, our meals differ in no respects
from the act of a horse or of a pig taking a feed. It is a strange
mistake to suppose that there is anything intellectual or _spirituel_
in hurrying through one’s meals. The truth of the matter is exactly the
reverse. To tarry at the table for the purpose of conversation makes
every meal a school for the intellect, and for the promotion of the
domestic and social graces. The savage hurries over his meals because
he is a savage, morally and intellectually near of kin to the brute. If
he could tarry over his meals he would have ceased to be a savage. All
ancient and modern nations that have been highly civilised have acted
instinctively on this idea. The Attic _symposia_, as well as the French
_petits soupers_, rested upon it. Suppose meals are to be silently
hurried through, they become mere brutish acts of eating and drinking,
which any animal can perform as well as ourselves, and in much less
time too. It is here that the Americans have a grand opportunity, in
their widely diffused and generally practised hotel life, of which, it
seemed to me, they were not availing themselves. You will see people
day after day sit down to the same table, take their food in silence,
and leave the table without a word having been spoken. You may observe
several tables occupied at the same time in your neighbourhood, and
there shall be no conversation going on at any one of them. Those
who sit at them appear to be entirely occupied either with their own
thoughts or with attention to what they are eating. But it would make
hotel life far more agreeable, and impart to it a far greater amount
of civilising power, if it were the rule that people who meet at the
same table might converse with one another, without any previous
acquaintance, and without any necessity for subsequent acquaintance.
Let it be understood that on such occasions conversation is the correct
and the civilised thing.

No American will ever undertake any of the lower forms of labour—very
few of the men before the mast in American ships are native-born. The
class of agricultural labourers is unknown among them. What labour they
have of this kind is supplied by immigration. No American would become
a footman or hotel waiter. Their railways were not made by American
navvies. In the North all the lower kinds of labour—but which, though
they rank low as employments, are still necessary to the well-being,
even to the existence of society—have hitherto fallen to the lot of the
Irish, English, and German immigrants. Their place has been taken in
the South by the blacks, and in the Pacific States by the Chinese.

[Sidenote: _The Future of the Servile Classes._]

This suggests two very interesting questions. The first is, Can a
republic be carried on without a servile class? What would be the state
of things in the American Union if it were deprived of the services of
the Irish, the blacks, and the Chinese? Of course the loss would be
much felt, and would very much retard the progress of the country; but
I do not think that it would be a loss that would be irremediable and
ruinous. As soon as the country begins to fill up, there will begin to
appear in America the class that has existed in every country in the
world, composed of those who have neither property nor a knowledge of
any trade (which can seldom be obtained by those who have no property),
and who therefore have nothing to live upon except their power of doing
rude and unskilled work.

The other question is, What will be the future in the American Republic
of these three races? The African, we may be sure, will either die
out, which is most probable, or become a low caste, the pariahs of
the New World: retail trade and a few of the lower kinds of labour
and employment will be open to them. They will possess civil but
not political rights. The Irish will be absorbed into the general
population; and so one may speculate to what extent this will affect
the American character. The Chinese can never be absorbed. What
therefore will be the position that they will occupy in the Union fifty
or a hundred years hence? Hitherto only one State has been open to
them, that of California. Can anything be inferred from the position
they have created for themselves in that State? I think we may be
safe in supposing that, as they have already crossed the Pacific to
the number of sixty thousand, when by the completion of the Pacific
Railway the whole of the Union is thrown open to them, they will not
remain cooped up in California. In a few years I believe they will be
found in New York, and in all the large cities of the west and east.
Voltaire said that the true wall of China was the American continent,
the interposition of which saved it from European invasion; but it
appears now that the American continent is the very point at which the
European races will be invaded by the long pent up population of China.
To what extent will this invasion be carried? and what consequences
will result from it? One thing, I think, may be foreseen—the Americans
will not admit these Asiatics, aliens in religion as well as in race,
to political equality with themselves.

A recent writer on America has informed us that there is a
disinclination among the wives of the luxurious cities of the Atlantic
seaboard to become mothers. I found, after enquiry made everywhere on
the spot, that this indisposition to bring up children is not confined
to the wives or to the cities this writer’s words indicate, but is
participated in, to a large extent, by the husbands, and is coextensive
with the American Union. It is just as strongly felt at Denver, two
thousand miles away, as at New York, and results in almost as much evil
at New Orleans as at Chicago.

[Sidenote: _Limitation of Offspring._]

The feeling—or, it might be said, this absence of natural feeling—may
easily be explained. The expenses and annoyances of house-keeping are
in America very great; and young couples, except when they are rich—and
such cases must always form a small minority—generally escape them by
living in hotels. Hotel living is always according to tariff, so much
a week for each person. To a couple living in this way, and barely
able to find the means for it, the cost of every additional child can
be calculated to a dollar, and is seriously felt. As long as they
are without children they may get on comfortably enough, and go into
society, and frequent places of amusement. But if encumbered with the
expense of a family, they will have to live a far quieter and less gay
life. They cannot give up their autumn excursion, they cannot give up
balls, and dresses, and concerts, and carriages. Therefore the husband
and wife come to an understanding that they will have but one child, or
that they will have no children at all.

Another reason for the practice, which would appear to affect the wife
only, but which has frequently much weight with the husband also, is
that the American lady’s reign is not, under any circumstances, a
long one. She has generally considerable personal attractions, but
the climate and the habits, of living are so trying that beauty is
very short-lived. The young wife therefore argues, ‘My good time will
under any circumstances be short; why, therefore, should I prematurely
dilapidate myself by having half-a-dozen children? And indeed what
would that come to, but that I should have no good time at all, for
the whole of it would be given up to the nursery? And by the time this
would be over, I should be nothing but a wreck; my good looks will have
disappeared, and I shall have fallen into premature old age.’

I met with husbands who themselves justified the practice on these
grounds. They did not wish to have their wives, during the whole period
of their good looks, in the nursery.

There is no secret as to the various means resorted to for carrying out
these unnatural resolutions. They are advertised in every newspaper,
and there are professors of the art in abundance, judging from the
advertisements, in every city. There is one large establishment in the
most fashionable street in the city of New York, from whence the great
high priestess of this evil system dispenses her drugs and advice, and
where also she receives those who need her direct assistance. These
things are so notorious and are so much talked of, that one is absolved
from the necessity of being at all reticent about them.

No one, of course, would suppose that any practice of this kind, so
abhorrent to our best natural instincts, could become universal: nor is
it so in America: many denounce it. But still it spreads; and we cannot
expect that it will die away, as long as the motives which prompt it
continue to be felt as strongly as they are at present.

I will note one of the evil consequences of the practice. When those
who have acted in this unnatural way are no longer young, and the
motives which prompted their conduct have ceased to have any weight,
the husband and wife find that there is no tie between them. They have
no reason to respect each other. Each condemns the other, and is in the
other’s presence self-condemned. And this is one of the causes of the
numerous divorces which so much astonish those who look into the social
conditions of American life. Nature and our common moral sense will
avenge themselves for such outrages.

[Sidenote: _Life-wrecks in America._]

A stranger travelling in America is not likely to receive letters
to any except prosperous persons, and so, unless he is on his guard
against it, his personal experience is likely to be confined to the
bright and splendid side of society. But from the observations and
enquiries I made, I came to the conclusion that there is no country in
which the proportion of those whose destiny it is to suffer complete
eclipse of happiness is so great as in the United States. Among
men one chief cause of this appeared to me to be the irresistible
attraction a life of heartless dissipation has for multitudes of young
Americans. Why is this so? I believe their theory of social equality
is responsible for some of it. They have a fatal craving to appear as
fashionable, and to enjoy life as much as their wealthy neighbours.
But I do not suppose that this will account for everything. After all,
the careers that are open to city-bred young men are very limited.
Practically for them there is not much beyond the counting-house and
the store. Farming, the great employment of the country, is repulsive
to them; and the ranks of the law are generally recruited from the
hard-headed and enterprising sons of farmers. But be the cause what
it may, there stands the fact that in the large American cities, and
of course nowhere to such an extent as in New York, there is to be
found a large class of young men of very limited means, who are living
dissipated lives, and whose great aim is to appear fashionable—a
detestable word, and a vulgar and unmanly idea, of which we in the old
country have not heard much since the times of the Regency.

The case of the women who fail in life is more sad than that of the
men, because, while they have less control over their own destinies,
the failure in establishing a happy home is to them the failure of
everything. The impracticable theory of social equality, I was again
led to believe, was frequently the cause of such failures. These young
women have been brought up in precisely the same way as their more
fortunate sisters, at the same or at similar schools. This makes, in
after life, the distinctions that meet the eye—of dress, equipage, and
position—enter like iron into the soul; and so the determination to
appear as others do becomes the rock upon which the happiness of many
is wrecked.

These, however, are matters upon which a stranger will be very
distrustful of his own observation, and will always hold himself open
to correction from those upon the phenomena of whose social life he is
commenting.

[Sidenote: _The Hub of the World._]

I will append to the foregoing remarks on the way in which many young
persons in American cities make a wreck of their life’s chances, an
outline of the course I observed many families ran in America. The
son of a farmer, we will say in Massachusetts, has some ambition.
There is no field for ambition in New England farming. He therefore
goes to Boston, or some commercial town, and becomes a lawyer, or a
merchant, or a professional man of some kind or other. He rises to
wealth and distinction, which are not so often secured by the city-born
as by those who have the energy and vigour of new blood fresh from
the country. He leaves his family well off. They never go back to the
country. If any of the children have the energy and vigour of the
father, they do not enter into business in Boston, but go out to the
west, and help to build up such places as Chicago and Omaha. But if,
as is generally the case, they have not energy and vigour enough for
this, they go to New York, or some large city, where refined society
and amusements are to be had. Some travel much, and take life easily.
Some occasionally enter into political life. They marry city ladies,
who are possessed of great refinement, but have very bad constitutions.
They have two or three children with long thin fingers and weak spines.
There is no fourth generation.

An Englishman cannot feel towards Americans as he does towards Italians
or Frenchmen. Wherever in America he sees a piece of land being
cleared and settled, or a church or a school being built, he looks on
as if something were being done by and for his own countrymen. There
is, however, one thing the evil effects of which he regrets to see
everywhere, and that is the restrictions by which his American brethren
are everywhere limiting trade and production. As he goes through
their vast continent, and visits region after region, each capable
of producing some different commodity the world needs, in sufficient
quantities for the wants of all civilised nations, he rejoices at the
greatness of their prospects, at the contemplation of all the wealth
that God has given them. And he feels certain that the day cannot
be very distant when they themselves will make the discovery that a
dollar’s worth of wheat, or maize, or cotton, or tobacco, or pork—and,
when the plains shall be turned to account, of beef, or mutton, or
wool—is exactly equal in value to a dollar’s worth of manufactured
goods, and two dollars’ worth is exactly twice the value, and a hundred
dollars’ worth is of exactly a hundred times the value. And that when
they shall have made this discovery they will strike off the fetters
from trade and production, and by a single vote of their legislature
increase the national wealth no one can foresee how many fold; and thus
make themselves, what their vast and all-producing country, commanding
both oceans and placed midway between Europe and Asia, is only waiting
to become—the hub of the world.




CHAPTER XXIII.

ON AMERICAN COMMON SCHOOLS—CONCLUSION.

[Sidenote: _American Common Schools._]

It was my practice, wherever I was staying, to visit some of the
schools of the place. I have spoken of several of these visits in the
foregoing pages. I will now give, collectively, the conclusions at
which I arrived on the subject of education in America, after an actual
inspection of schools, and much conversation with persons interested
and engaged in educational work in every part of the Union, with the
exception of the new States on the Pacific coast.

We have had the American Common School system held up before us for
many years for our imitation. We have been told that, compared with
it, our own efforts in the cause of education are discreditable and
contemptible. We have been urged to look at what they are doing; to
consider how highly they tax themselves for this purpose; to admire
the effects of this system, as seen in a people, the whole of whom are
now educated and intelligent. Of course the inference always is, that
the best thing we can do is to go and do likewise. These are vague
generalities, which an acquaintance with the subject will in some
respects largely modify.

First, I demur to the statement that Americans do tax themselves so
highly for the purpose of education. It would be much nearer to the
truth to say that there is no people on the face of the earth who
educate their children so cheaply as the Americans; and therefore
much more in conformity with the facts of their case, and of ours in
this matter, to urge us to endeavour, by considering their example,
to cheapen education amongst ourselves. I have now before me the most
recent report of the Board of Education for the city of New York. It
is for the year 1866. From this it appears that, taking together all
the common schools of the city, the Primary, the Grammar, the Coloured,
the Evening, the Normal, the Corporate, and the Free Academy, now the
College of the City of New York, there are 227,691 children and young
persons receiving education at a total cost for everything—including
rents, purchases of sites, building, repairs, and salaries of officers
of the board, as well as of the teachers—of 2,420,883 dollars, or
about 30_s._ a head. Are the children of any city in England educated
as cheaply? These schools educate a considerable proportion of the
children of the higher class, that is the professional men and
merchants; speaking generally, all the children of the middle class,
that is of the tradesmen; and as many of the children of the artisan
and unskilled labouring class as their parents choose to send. This
30_s._ is a high average for American cities. I believe it is higher
than any other in the United States. Tradesmen with us pay about 35_l._
a year for a child kept at a boarding-school, and about 15_l._ a year
for the education given at day schools. In the great city of New York
about 400,000_l._ a year is spent on the education of all classes,
plus the cost of the few of the upper class who are sent to private
schools. How much more, we may ask, is spent here on the education
of 227,691 children of the different ranks in life of these New York
children? There can be no doubt but that our unmethodical system,
notwithstanding our numerous foundations, costs us much more than their
system costs the Americans. Ours is the costliest educational system in
the world; theirs the most economical.

[Sidenote: _Cheapness of American Schools._]

This is still more apparent when we pass from the towns to the country.
There the cost frequently falls below 10_s._ a head. The children
educated in these schools are those of the proprietors of the land,
but who cultivate it themselves as well as own it. Are the children of
this class, in any part of the world, educated for so small a number
of shillings a year? Why, in New York you have to pay as much for a
pair of gloves, and more for a bottle of wine. In Illinois, one of the
richest States in the Union, and whose population is probably better
off than any equal number of people in any other country, the average
cost for the children of the whole State is little more than this
10_s._ a head. And in Massachusetts, the State in which attention has
been most carefully and for the longest time directed to the subject,
and where everything is done that is thought necessary, the average for
the town and country children actually at school is only 25_s._

The fact is simply this. The rural population in America is the most
homogeneous in the world. It is composed entirely of farmers, and of
their sons and brothers who are the professional men and tradesmen
of the district. Landlordism and tithes are unknown: so there is no
one above the farmer-proprietor, and from New York to San Francisco
there is no such class as our agricultural labourer, and so there is
no one below the farmer. Now, how can a number of families of this
kind, who are all completely on a footing of social equality, and
also, if the word may be allowed to pass, pretty nearly of possessive
equality, best educate their children? In a new country there are
no foundation schools and few private ones—that is to say, to all
practical purposes, no schools at all. There is, therefore, but one way
of getting what they want—that is, by establishing schools of their
own; and this can only be done by taxing themselves. There is no great
sagacity shown in seeing this; and, as a matter of fact, everyone in
America sees it. It is not seen more clearly in Massachusetts than it
is in Ohio, or in Ohio than in California, or in California than in
Colorado. I understood, indeed, that the schools of California (I had
no opportunity of examining them myself) are the best in the Union;
and the statement is not incredible, for the Californians are a people
who will have nothing that is second-rate. One can hardly get now at
any price a real Havana cigar in London or Paris, because the people
of San Francisco will always pay the best price for the best thing.
And in the territory, for it is not yet the State of Colorado, in the
mountains, at Denver, and on the plains, two thousand miles away from
Massachusetts, I saw the common-school system at work, in places where
Judge Lynch is still the guardian of society in its infancy. No motive
of patriotism or philanthropy can act in this universal and unfailing
way. It can only be done by all, and in the same way by all, because
it is obviously for the interest of all to do it, and because they
could not get what they want in any other way. It is not forced on the
rural townships by the general government of the State, but it permits
them to tax themselves, if they please. And as they happen to raise
the money they require by a tax, it becomes easy to ascertain exactly
what the amount is; and the figures, as they include all that is paid
for educating the children of a large State, appear to represent a
very considerable sum, although, when it is looked into, it is seen to
be the cheapest work of the kind that is anywhere done. The State of
Illinois has now perhaps 10,000 schools, not far from 20,000 teachers,
and about 600,000 scholars. The aggregate sum with which the people
tax themselves for these schools and scholars appears very great, but
in reality there are no other 600,000 scholars so cheaply educated.
Our two schools of Eton and Harrow cost the parents of the children
educated at them more than these 10,000 schools cost the people of
Illinois.

[Sidenote: _The Mother of the Invention._]

And when we come to look into the working of the American school system
in the cities, we see that nothing could be done without the motives
I have spoken of, as never failing to bring about one uniform result
in the country. The artisans, and tradesmen, and small professional
men know that this is the best and cheapest way for them to get the
kind of education they desire for their children. They are the great
majority, and so of course the thing is done. There is a general
tax, and common schools are established. And, as they have some
advantages besides that of cheapness, they are used by many of the
upper class—I mean merchants, bankers, and successful professional
men, especially those who wish to stand well with the democracy. None
can be excluded from the schools (indeed no one wishes it), and so
they are open to the lowest class of the town population, with which
there is nothing to correspond in the country. In truth, so far from
wishing for any exclusion, great efforts are made to get hold of the
children of ignorant and vicious parents, both from philanthropic and
from self-interested motives, because in cities where every man has
the suffrage, a vicious and ignorant population is doubly inconvenient
and dangerous. Hitherto, however, the Americans have hardly succeeded
in the towns better than we have, in their efforts to bring these
children into their schools. At New York they have supplemented the
common schools with a system of industrial schools, intended especially
for those who would never enter the common schools. But all that can
be said of them is, that they have met the evil they were intended
to remedy to some small extent. At Chicago, I was told by the able
superintendent of the city schools that there were 20,000 children in
that city who frequented no school. And this is a growing evil in all
the great cities of the Union.

[Sidenote: _Abundance of Good Teaching Material._]

The Americans, then, very wisely (in fact they could do nothing better,
perhaps nothing else) have established, in the country and in the
cities, common schools for their own children. What we are called
upon to do is a totally different thing; and this I insist upon as
another great distinction between what they have done, and what we are
doing, in this matter. We have to establish schools for other people’s
children. With them those who pay for the school profit by it. With
us those who will pay for the school will never derive any advantage
from it. The point for us to settle is, How shall farmers and landlords
be made to tax themselves for the education of labourers’ children;
and how shall the householders, and professional men, and tradesmen
of a town be made to tax themselves for the schooling of the children
of artisans and operatives? The Americans may be left to manage the
business themselves, for it is their own affair. But we cannot: with us
the law must be imperative, not permissive, and constant supervision
will be needed; and to secure this right of supervision, it will
probably be found necessary that the State should itself contribute
largely towards the maintenance of the school.

The Americans possess an advantage in their schools to which there is
at present no prospect of our attaining. The teachers of our elementary
schools are taken from the humblest and most uneducated stratum of
society, and have to be trained for their work. They have none of the
traditions of mental culture, and their sentiments must in a great
measure be those of their relations and friends. The humbleness of
their origin does also considerably detract from the social position
it would be desirable they should occupy. In America a like origin
would not have the same effect; but here the daughter of a labourer
or mechanic has not the influence with the parents of the children,
or the respect shown to her, which would be readily conceded if she
were the daughter of a farmer or tradesman; and it is from these two
classes, whose social position is much higher in America than it is
here, that the greater part of their teachers are drawn. They come from
an educated class, and are entitled by their antecedents, as well as
by their office, to some position, and they know how to assert it and
maintain it. They have no more timidity or _mauvaise honte_ than their
friends. They are full of energy and ambition, and there is always
animation in their teaching. It is quite impossible for any country to
have better material for teachers than America has. And they appear to
have an inexhaustible supply of it. ‘Our half a million of teachers’
is not an uncommon expression among them; but though this must pass
for an American figure of speech, still what it implies is true, that
whatever number of teachers may be required will always be forthcoming.
I once heard an American bachelor in this country affirm that whenever
he thought of marrying he should, other things being equal, give the
preference to a lady who had for some years been a school-teacher. I
do not know to what extent this sentiment is shared by my friend’s
countrymen, or whether the lady-teachers of American schools are aware
of the existence of this feeling in their favour; but at all events it
shows that the social position of teachers is regarded as good.

[Sidenote: _Grading, an Improvement on Classes._]

Of course it is a mere truism to say that American teachers would be
more efficient if they had had more special training. But whatever
their deficiency may be in this respect, the advantages I have just
spoken of as possessed by them are very manifest; and as soon as you
enter an American school (this may be said generally of those in the
North), you feel at once that you are surrounded by quite a different
atmosphere from anything you are familiar with at home.

Another advantage their schools possess over ours is, that they are
what, in American school-phraseology, is called ‘graded.’ This, unlike
what I have just been mentioning, may be transplanted to our side of
the water. I need not now explain what grading means, because I have
spoken more than once of this method of arranging and teaching schools.
It ensures much more careful teaching than our method, and that the
whole of the school-time shall be devoted to study. I know that there
are some who have recently said that it fails in individualising
each case. I see, however, no force in this remark, because I was
struck with the degree to which the very reverse of it resulted
from the adoption of the method. It must be compared with the only
other alternative for schools—that of the class system—and a little
consideration will show that it is the class system perfected; for
it is simply the assigning of one class to one person, and obliging
that person to devote the whole of the school-time, from the first to
the last minute, to teaching that one class. It prevents the scholars
having any idle time while they are in school. It necessitates a great
deal of oral teaching. It concentrates the teacher’s whole attention on
one point, as well as on one class.

It does also very much cheapen the cost of education. But this is not a
benefit that will, among ourselves, be so understood and felt as that
there should be any desire to secure it, until we have rate-supported
schools. Our adoption of the rate to some extent, and in some form or
other, can only be a question of time, for it is the only just method
of supporting open schools; and the people will be averse to the
schools in which their children are educated bearing an eleemosynary
character. And when that day shall have come, then the majority of the
rate-payers here, just as in America, will be in favour of the system,
which, while it very much improves the teaching, will at the same time
very much diminish its cost, by substituting where parishes are small
one school for many.

Any remarks on American schools would be very incomplete if nothing
were said on the exclusion from them of all direct or dogmatic
religious teaching. The general rule is that a small portion, sometimes
limited to ten verses, of the Holy Scriptures should be read daily,
and that this should be followed by the Lord’s Prayer. Some cities
and districts allow more latitude for the prayer, a choice of certain
forms that are provided being permitted, or even an extempore prayer
founded on the Lord’s Prayer. In some schools moral, as distinguished
from religious or doctrinal teaching, may be founded on the portion of
Scripture that has been read. Christianity, therefore, and the Bible
are not ignored, as much being done as can be done in schools that are
supported equally by many Churches differing from one another in their
interpretation of the Bible. The masters, however, do not in all cases
avail themselves of the opportunities allowed them for reading the
Holy Scriptures and for prayer. Among the laity there is spreading a
feeling of disapprobation at such omissions.

[Sidenote: _Non-religious not Irreligious._]

But what is the effect of this limitation of religious teaching? It
must be remembered that these are all day schools. The children are
present in school only during school hours. They are under the parental
roof every night, at all their meals, and during the morning and
evening of each day. The teacher, therefore, is not _in loco parentis_,
as he is in the case of the child who boards and lodges with him, and
is entirely entrusted to his care. The parents still have ample time
and opportunities for all the religious instruction they desire to give
their children, and then there is the Sunday, the Sunday-school, and
the teaching of the ministers of religion. The question, therefore, as
far as the primary schools are concerned, narrows itself to this—Is
any irreligious effect produced by the absence of all direct dogmatic
teaching from a school in which the children are only present a few
hours a day, and where they go for the purpose of learning to read,
write, and cipher, with a little geography and music? I do not think
that much evil results from this, nor do I think that any very great
amount of good would result from any attempt to alter the present
system.

In the grammar school, where the instruction is not so mechanical, the
conditions of the question are somewhat different. But even here I do
not think that the tendency of the system is irreligious. I cannot
believe that the cultivation of the intellect, even if there be nothing
addressed directly and formally to their spiritual instincts, is, in
the case of children so circumstanced as these, necessarily evil and
hostile to religion. It would be so if they were confined for all the
year, except the vacations, to the walls of a boarding-school, and the
subject of religion never alluded to. But here again, as was observed
with respect to the scholars of the primary school, the influences of
home, of the church, and of the Sunday-school, ought to render the
silence of the week-day school in a great measure innocuous. And this
is the more likely to be the case with the scholars of the grammar
school, as their parents do for the most part belong to a higher grade
in society.

[Sidenote: _What is Really Taught._]

But if the system be tried in the most legitimate of all ways, that
is by its fruits, I do not think that we shall have any reason to be
dissatisfied with it. The sums raised voluntarily every year in the
United States for the building and maintenance of churches, and for
the support of the ministers of religion, is quite unequalled by what
is collected in the same way among any population of equal amount in
the world. It is impossible to ascertain a point of this kind, but I
believe that it is far greater than what is contributed voluntarily by
the whole of the Latin race. Almost the first buildings raised in the
newest settlements are the churches. No one, unless he has experienced
it, can tell what are the feelings and thoughts that spontaneously
arise on finding yourself, as you enter such a place as Denver, beyond
the prairies and the plains, as it were, welcomed by the Houses of
God, which are the most conspicuous buildings of the place; and then,
again, a few miles further on, as you pass through the first gorge of
the mountains at Golden City, to find yourself surrounded by a cluster
of three churches; and when you have got up among the little mining
towns, perched like eagles’ nests in the clefts of the mountains, still
to find that the object which first of all attracts your attention is
the little tower or spire, albeit of wood, that marks the building
consecrated to God’s service. I was astonished at the amount collected
in the offertory at many of the churches in which I attended the
service. I found the Sunday as well observed in America as I ever saw
it anywhere else. I know that there are some facts to be set down on
the other side, but they do not counterbalance what I have just been
pointing out. And so the conclusion that I arrived at on this question
was, that I should have liked some direct Christian teaching in the
primary schools, and still more in the grammar schools, but this I
knew was impossible. And on the whole I was not dissatisfied with the
results of the American system of education on the religious character
of the people.

Only one point remains—What, after all, do these schools teach? It has
been lately objected to them that they aim at information, and not at
the development of the faculties; and that they do not cultivate the
taste. We are speaking of the common schools, and so of course are
thinking of what school education in America does for the artisan and
labouring class, and the lower stratum of the middle class; that is,
children corresponding to those who are taught in our national schools,
and those of a somewhat higher grade in society. Are the faculties
(for that is the word insisted on by the most recent writer on the
subject) of these two classes at all more developed here at home by our
schools, than they are in America by their common schools? Or what
fruit does our system bear among these classes in the refinement and
the cultivation of the taste? Or, to put the question in the ordinary
way, Are these classes better taught, rendered better able to use their
wits, and rescued to a greater extent from the brutalising effects of
ignorance among ourselves, or among them? Could the American system do
more for these classes? If it could, I should be disposed to say it
might do more for them on the very point where it is alleged that it
does comparatively too much, that of giving information. But I do not
say this because I thoroughly approved of so much time being devoted
not in the least to imparting information, but to what is the main
point in the schooling of those who must leave school very young—the
teaching them to read, to write, and to cipher, with accuracy and
facility. Among ourselves there is an enormous amount of failure in
these primary matters; among the Americans there is very little failure
in them. They teach their scholars to write with so much ease, that we
may be sure they will never forget or lay aside the use of the pen;
and they teach them to read with so much ease, and so much with the
understanding, that we may be sure they will continue to read when they
have left school. Do our schools accomplish this?

[Sidenote: _The Dawn of a Better Day._]

For ‘the development of the faculties,’ which are big words with rather
indistinct meaning, I would substitute the concentration of the powers
of the mind on special subjects, such as poetry, history, classical
literature, philology, and the different branches of physical science,
and I would say that the Americans as a nation have not yet arrived at
the point where we may expect much either of this, or of ‘refinement of
taste.’ At present all their mental strength and activity is required
for the grand work of bringing a new world into subjection to man.
They become settlers in the wilderness, or engineers and machinists,
or merchants, or professional men, or newspaper-writers. All who enter
on these employments are wanted in them, and can get a living by them.
They invite and receive and remunerate all the energetic minds of the
nation. But it will not always be so. As soon as the continent begins
to fill up, and extension ceases, then multitudes of active minds will
not find themselves called to the same employments as those of the
present generation are. The battle with nature will then be over. By
that time, too, wealth will have accumulated and become hereditary in
many families. There will be many to appreciate, as well as many to
devote themselves to art and literature. It is then that we may expect
that the American mind and American culture will bear their fruit. They
will then, I believe, have schools and styles of art of their own,
and a literature of their own, as untrammelled as that of Greece, and
richer and more varied than that of any other age or country. The day
for these things has not yet come, but we see already the symptoms of
the dawn; and when it has come, I think there will be no ground for
complaining of ‘want of development of the faculties,’ or of ‘want of
refinement of taste’ in America.

       *       *       *       *       *

I trust that no word has been inadvertently set down in this book,
should it be so fortunate as to find some readers among those who
treated me with so much hospitality and kindness, which can in any
way be displeasing to an American. If any from that side shall have
accompanied me through its pages, now that the time for saying
‘farewell’ has arrived, my one wish is, that they may have come to look
upon me somewhat in the light in which one of my Boston acquaintances
told me a week’s intercourse had brought him to regard me, that is, ‘as
one of themselves.’


  LONDON: PRINTED BY
  SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE
  AND PARLIAMENT STREET




  Transcriber’s Notes

  pg 136 Changed: bcomes on that account more disappointing
              to: becomes on that account more disappointing

  pg 229 Changed: gallopping over a plain
              to: galloping over a plain