AMERICA AND & AMERICAN AMERICA AND THE AMERICANS AMERICA AND THE AMERICANS FROM A FRENCH POINT OF VIEW SEVENTH EDITION CHARLES SCRIBNER S SONS NEW YORK v -.- -.- ... 1897 COPYRIGHT, 1897, BY CHARLES SCRIBNER S SONS TROW DIRECTORY PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY NEW YORK TO // may seem strange to the readers of some of these pages that I dedicate this little book to you, an American the loveliest, the truest, the most competent of women, worthy to wear a coronet in any country, needing none in your own. I lay my prejudices as a Frenchman at your feet. Were all your countrywomen like you, there could be no happier land than this. A o America and the Americans say, a succeeding friendship with both the above-mentioned Secretary and his wife led us to the discovery that a certain distant American relative of Lafayette, who accompanied him relatives* , . , on his second voyage to the New World, saw and was conquered by a beautiful Amer ican whom he met at Newport, and after ward married. Hence it turned out that the beautiful Madam R. is in sooth a rela tive very distant of our family. This accounts for my sister s anxiety to hear more in detail of my impressions, first of Madam R. (alas ! for the vanity of women), and then of America and the Americans. As I had affairs of importance to attend to in England, I went first to England and sailed from Liverpool to New York on one of Her Majesty s White Star line of steam ers, But one travels, I should think, under English auspices only when one cannot travel protected by a French chef, and made comfortable by French attendance. I am no Anglophobist, but the English cannot make coffee, so that a Frenchman has no breakfast ; they cannot dress salad, Liverpool to New York h?nce no luncheon ; they cannot make soup, hence an ill-regulated dinner. As one lives but to eat at sea, this is a serious defect ; and though Crecy, Agincourt, and Waterloo are suggestive arguments in fa vor of English meat and drink, even to a .... /--IT gastrono- Frenchman, still they have failed to con- my. vince me in favor of a breakfast for a glad iator, a luncheon for a bull-dog, and dinner for a digestive apparatus run by electricity. It was a disappointment to me on look ing over the passenger-list to find that most of my fellow-travellers were not Amer icans, but Germans, or so, at least, such names as Arnheim, Bethel, Blumberger, Salzberg, and others led me to suppose. But I was soon to discover my mistake. In spite of the fact that even I spoke better English than most of the other frequenters of the smoking-room, I was told by a young gentleman from Boston that all these people with the strange German names were Amer icans. He told me also to take a tram-car ride down Broadway, on my arrival in New York, to see for myself to what a dol orous extent that great city had become 3 America and the Americans Semiticized. These loud - talking, pool- selling, pool-buying, story-telling denizens of the smoking-room, who spoke broken English, were, as he had affirmed, Ameri cans. One of the large retail shops in New York, the shop which, without equal courtesy and business-like methods, attempts to do for New York what the Bon Marche does for Paris, and Whiteley s for London, is in the hands of the Jews. These people are, said my young friend, the banker, from Boston, the Chinese of our retail trade. And surely one has only to read the signs from one end of Broadway to the other to be made ac quainted with the fact that the Mosaic de spoiling of the Egyptians goes on with re newed vigor in New York to-day. The famous New York cafe, The Del- monicos, is a veritable synagogue at the dinner-hour, for these mongrel Americans are not pcrsonce grates at the clubs, and are driven to congregate in restaurants. One of the avenues running parallel to the Fifth Avenue is almost given over to them as a place of residence, and I was told that Liverpool to New York it is a favorite amusement of certain idle young gentlemen to ride in the horse-cars on this particular avenue, and to make bets as to the percentage of their fellow-passengers who between any two given streets will have straight noses. One of the best-known monthly magazines is in their hands ; the minor and least attractive legal business of the city is theirs to such an extent that rep utable practitioners have more than once threatened to take proceedings against their disreputable methods, and the newspaper of the largest circulation, and of the most unsavory reputation, in New York, is also owned by a Jew. /They are so numerous, and control so much money and so many votes, and fight for one another so unscru- pulously, that no one criticises or attacks them openly, though on all hands one hears sneers, innuendoes, and dislike expressed. My only opportunity for judging of their good or bad qualities was what I saw and heard in the smoking-room during the voy age. For one meets them socially nowhere at the clubs, in society, or elsewhere. Of the score or more whom I could study America and the Americans Cheap patriotism. " Ich weiss nicht was soil es be- deuten ! " at leisure on the steamer, whether they were typical or not, I do not know. They were theatrically American, however ; much given to a constant display of cheap pa triotism, which led one to surmise that they were themselves a little self-conscious about it, and, like all pretence, theirs revealed itself in awkwardness and exaggeration. I was told later by an ex -politician that the cheap retail business, whether com mercial, theatrical, legal, or journalistic, was largely in the hands of these people. On one occasion they attempted, in the name of the Germans of New York, to foist a statue and it was said a poor one of Heine upon their good - humored step brothers, the native Americans, but this was too severe a test of their influence, and the statue was declined. As a foreigner it struck me as being supremely ridiculous that the statue of a foreigner, however eminent, which had been refused by three cities of his native land, should even be suggested as appropriate in America. But as we shall see or, rather, as I shall say all through these pages, the good -humor of 6 Liverpool to New York the Americans is their greatest virtue, and their most appalling vice. If these people were not fair types of the American, there was a young lady on board An the steamer who was, I was informed, typi cal of a large class of boarding-house, sum mer-hotel Americans. She was of that V wiry, thin, convex-back and concave-chest development that one sees frequently in the country towns of America. She had bright eyes, a tireless tongue, and a frank independence of manner, which would have been suspicious in a Frenchwoman, awk ward in an Englishwoman, and impossible in a German Backfisch, though in her own case it was apparently natural enough. In twenty-four hours she knew every unat tached man on board the ship, and had walked and chatted with most of them, in cluding myself. She was protected or abetted in her promiscuous independence by her father, who saw her only at meal- hours in calm weather, when he was able to be about. She lounged about in steamer- chairs with this one and that, and was often on deck alone with one man or another when America and the Americans A morose view of he* Difficulty of this rbl< all the other female passengers had retired. She was only about twenty years of age, but her innocence, or her experience, or her temperament, seemed a sufficient safe guard for her. To me she was merely a cu riosity, but my friend from Boston sniffed at her from afar, remarking that she rep resented one of the pests of American civ ilization, one of those divorce-breeding, and divorce-excusing, women who are bad with out vice, and good by the grace of God> x Later, during a tour of the American summer-resorts with an American friend, the son of one of New York s ex-mayors, I saw numbers of this class of young women. It is not surprising that neither Frenchmen nor Englishmen understand them, for in France only a woman who is less innocent, and in England only a woman who is more innocent, could play this role. But here such an one is, strange to say, neither cocotte nor coquette. She aims neither at your pocket nor at your heart. She per mits every liberty, but no license, and owes her existence to the reckless carelessness and good-humor of the American parent, Liverpool to New York and to a certain climatic influence which makes for sexlessness. For it is, indeed, true Tempera- that, with the exception of the Southern States, there is a steady falling off in the birth-rate among those who are of Ameri can parentage on both sides, for two or more generations back; so I was told, at least, by the polite and intelligent gentle man who is at the head of the Department of Statistics. This curious phase of the native Ameri can s physical temperament, and, coupled with it, a certain strained religious senti ment, make possible these promiscuous im proprieties, which here result harmlessly, but which in any other country would cer tainly entail social disasters. Nowhere have I seen or heard this point ^/ discussed namely, the influence of the climate upon the procreative powers. It may well be that this terrible climate, with its ninety-eight, ninety-nine, and one hun dred degrees in the shade in summer; and in some parts as much as forty, and even more, below the zero point in winter, may have an unlooked-for effect upon the America and the Americans increase of population. When the tremen- chanxes in dons immigration of foreigners lessens, and character- the population, as a whole, has spent half a century in this nervous atmosphere, there may be, to the amazement of the statisti cians, a sudden cessation of the present enormous yearly increase of population. In the South, where the factor of im migration plays a less prominent part, al ready the negroes are increasing at a ratio of more than two to one faster than the whites. New York is no longer Dutch, though only one hundred years ago half the signs in William Street were in Dutch, and up to 1764 no sermon in English had been preached in any of the three Dutch churches. Delaware is no longer Scandinavian and Norwegian ; New England is no longer Old England, or New England, but French- Canadian and Irish, and not long ago Bos ton itself had an Irish Catholic as its mayor. Whether this is the result of the enormous immigration the increase in population during the ten years, 1880-90, was 12,466,467 or owing, in part at least, 10 Liverpool to New York to the growing sterility of the native-born Americans, is a matter that concerns ethni cal students, and which gains nothing from its discussion by a mere curious traveller like me. Our scientific historian, Taine, would attribute the taciturnity and moodiness of the men also to the climate. In two cen- Effects of turies the Puritans, the Cavaliers, the Hu- * guenots, and the Dutch, have grown quite away from the temperament of the parent stocks. The American is voluble enough, on occasion, as is the American Indian, but the salient traits of the Americans to day are their changeful moods. All hope one day, all discouragement the next. Taci turn and frowning, and then talkative and nervously jolly. Some of the men who have lived for a long time in the West are already very like the Indians in disposi tion ; and even in the East a serene equa bleness of disposition is far more- rare than among the men of Europe. Climate, en vironment, call it what you will, I merely note the fact, leaving it to the more studi ous to explain. ii II First Impressions of New York depends upon one s p oint O f view> To j u dge New York its politics, its social life, the manners and cultivation of its people from the level of The point Paris or London or Amsterdam or Rome, is to come to one s task with the eyes out of focus. One hundred years ago the population of Philadelphia was 32,205, the population of Boston was 14,640, and New York was a small Dutch town at the mouth of the Hudson with a population of 24,500. Scarcely a street was paved ; street-lamps were sometimes lighted and sometimes not ; at the hour when fashionable dinners begin now, all festivities and gayeties were over then, and the cry of the watchman, " Nine o clock and all s well," was heard ; John Jacob Astor, whose descendants now give 12 First Impressions of New York you dinners of the most luxurious descrip tion, had just landed in New York with his stock of violins ; theatres were tabooed as immoral ; there was no national coinage, and even so late as fifty years ago the small money consisted mainly of foreign coins ; there were no public libraries and no reading- rooms ; there was less mail-matter distrib- A century s uted then in a year by all the thirteen States than is now distributed in one day from the New York Post-office ; a man who had been to Europe was pointed out in the streets as a celebrity ; the total population of the na tion then, it is estimated, was about two and a half millions, now it is seventy millions ; the annual cost of carrying on the whole government was then 27,500,000 francs; in 1895 the disbursements for pensions alone were 704,796,805 francs, paid to almost a million different persons. These and many more facts of like im port should be in possession of the traveller incomplete- when he begins his sight-seeing in New "plained. York. Then the newness of it all; the vulgarity of much that one sees; the lack of repose ; the thousand and one details 13 America and the Americans left unattended to; the sudden fluctuations in the social and financial world ; the lack of courtesy among all the servants, public and private, and the lack of good manners among many of the masters ; the entire disregard of personal liberty and of indi vidual rights ; the strenuous efforts on all hands and by everybody de vouloir tout regler, excepte eux-memes, which may be said to be a national characteristic these features of this civilization, and much else besides, are judged differently if you bear in mind their own past, and do not at tempt to measure them by the thousand years of Paris or London, Venice or Rome. For the first glimpses of the city, as you New York sail into its glorious harbor, no excuses are needed. Some of the buildings are so high that they look like attempts of Jack, of the bean-stalk fame, to build a step- ladder to Heaven. The hard glaring light of the sun brings out sharply the outlines of the hundreds of colossal buildings stand ing where one hundred years ago the first Roosevelt had his tanneries, and the Lis- penard meadows were a favorite resort of 14 First Impressions of New York sportsmen, and land was sold by the acre which is now leased by the square foot. It affronts the imagination. Nowhere else in the world has the giant of material progress worn such huge seven-league boots. This is impossible in the life of little more than one generation of men, you say, as you stand on the deck of your steamer, but in another half hour you are disillusioned. You land on a rough wooden wharf; you are tumbled about and tumbled over by men who speak in the brogue of Ireland and the guttural of the Vaterland ; wagons and men and horses are tangled in an inextricable mass outside the rough shed ; you are bundled into an ill-smelling car riage with torn upholstery, which creaks and groans as it is bumped along over the wretched pavements, drawn by two Rosi- nantes in a tattered harness, and driven by an Irishman who throws aside his cigar only after he has driven a block or two, and whose costume is made up from the wreckage of a bankrupt livery-stable and a pawn-shop. You are charged fifteen francs for your drive of, perhaps, two miles, and 15 America and the Americans one franc extra for each piece of luggage, and though you pay peaceably through the nose, your coachman expectorates as he gets back on his carriage, with never a word of thanks, or a touch of the hat. Then it is that you say, " Ah, no, this is not a miracle, this is still a frontier settle ment ! But, alas ! for one s impressions. You are ushered to the rooms engaged for you by your friend in Washington at a hotel in Fifth Avenue. It has been done by telegraph, but in a moment the wharf and the hurly-burly and the expectorat ing Hibernian are forgotten. There are ; flowers on the table, there is a bath-room tions. . . . . . r done in tiles, there are soft carpets, beauti ful rugs, tasteful furniture, and the Figaro, Revue des deux Mondes, and Le Petit Jour nal, cut and on your table. The hot water pours into the tub in a torrent, the soap and towels are of the best, and the breakfast, of fruit, fish, eggs, and coffee, which follows soon after the bath, is served in costly porcelain. I am the guest of my friend here until the day after 16 First Impressions of New York to-morrow, which is the earliest moment he can get away from Washington. I am a Frenchman, I am economical, I look no gift-hur.se in the mouth, but 1 cannot refrain from wondering what this all costs. We met this young man, my Bister and I, in Paris, through the intro duction of my friend the attache. 1 father, an ex-mayor of the city, is, they ;i very rich man why or how I American know not, but lucri bonus esf <.-.L>r <A re qualibet as only these American nabobs are rich in these days rich in cash not in low-rent paying lands, like the English, or in small -interest bearing rentes, like my poor compatriots. i with us in the country, and was my guest at my {xx>r apartment in Paris, but we gave him nothing like unto this. I begin to regret my an-;cr at the wharf, A f my annoyance at the bumping-machine in Zf* which I was conveyed thence, my annihi- lating astonishment at the coachman s fare. Surely, 1 If, that momentary discomfort v. feature, but an ac cident, of this civilization. America and the Americans I begged to be let alone to-day and to morrow, therefore I dine alone in the evening down-stairs, at a small table, in a large dining-room. There are many peo- Tyfes. pie about in all sorts of costumes. At one table are two gentlemen ; one of them has a sandy chin-whisker which protrudes al most at right angles from his chin ; he and his friend have beefsteak, ice-cream, and champagne for their dinner. Not a dozen yards away is a party of four, two gentlemen and two ladies, the ladies de collete to the point of embarrassment, and with jewels on hands and neck, and in their hair. What exaggeration, I think to Extremes, myself. The gentleman of the aggressive chin-whisker only needs spurs and a som brero to be of the prairies ; while the la dies only need a little rouge, and as much off the length of their skirts as they have taken off their shoulders, to be of the erst while Mabille. But I doubt my own impressions now, and therefore I make no generalizations of New York s manners, customs, and cos tumes, from these people, who may not be 18 First Impressions of New York Americans at all. As for me, my own dinner is of the most excellent, et rien ne doit der anger f honnete homme qui dine. The next morning, having the day to myself, I remember me of the advice of the young banker from Boston. From my hotel to Broadway is not far. At the corner of the street I determine to mount one of the swift-passing tram-cars. They Aneiectri- rush by me, one after the other, bells clang ing, and silhouette figures swaying about inside. I hold up my hand in vain. As I am beginning to wonder whether they are all express-trains, a kindly stranger touches my arm and says : " You re on the wrong corner, my friend. They only stop on the farther corner, and if you don t want your arms jerked out, you d better mount the animal where he proposes to stop ! " I turn to bow my thanks, but my stranger takes two or three steps and a jump away from me, grasps the platform of a passing car, and as he fades away in the distance, I see him gesticulating to me to move down to the lower corner. He was right. I move clown a few steps, 19 America and the Americans and the next car stops in front of me with a rumble and a grating noise, which I af terward learn is made by an endless cable under the street, which is the motive power of all these rushing, clanging caravans. My particular car is crowded inside and out side. Each time it stops, you are hurled id- forward and then back. People bending * to sit down as the car starts, place their posteriors anywhere but where they in tended, and not infrequently in a space already occupied by another. The con ductor and the passengers come and go, over your feet, jamming your legs mean while; women at the far end of the car make signs at the conductor to stop, in vain, and finally elbow and shove them selves to the door, hurtling against other passengers, and flung now and then into the arms of those sitting down, as the car stops, or starts, suddenly. Not far from where I got on, the con ductor shouts something into the car, and What New- of a sudden we veer around a curve at a ^aif^ prodigious rate of speed, and one lady who "cuyrve" j^tf ^ QQn c lj n gj n g to a s t ra p in front of 1116 20 First Impressions of New York is whirled round, still holding to the strap, and knocks her neighbor s newspaper into his face, and dislocates his hat with the same movement ; while two men who had been standing in the door- way are shot into the car as from a catapult, where they A study , T acrobatics, are stopped short by those clinging to straps in the passage-way. At last I get a seat, and the drama that goes on about me interests me so much that I continue my ride as far as Wall Street, forgetting all about my intention to read the signs along the route. These tram-cars seem to be gymnasiums on wheels. The alertness of eye, and ner vous, strained look of the thin faces and wiry frames about me, are in some sort ex plained. Both men and women must be sharply and constantly watchful if they are to survive a daily pilgrimage, or, bet ter, a daily crusade in these vehicles. A second s inattention, a moment s respite from the dangling leather, which hangs from the roof, and you are shot into some body s back, bosom, or belly, or sent sprawling your length over the knees of 21 America and the Americans two or three of the seated passengers. There is little bodily harm done, but there is an ever-recurring succession of shocks to the dignity and to the nerves. American The most remarkable thing about it all impertur- . , babiuty, is, that no one seems disturbed or greatly put out by this involuntary riot which takes place every few seconds. These cars are owned by companies which in return for the valuable franchise of the use of the principal streets in the city, promise good transportation facilities at a cheap rate. They do it in the hig gledy-piggledy fashion above described. what -we In France such infringement of the rights \kinkifit of the people to personal comfort and per- * r ** sonal dignity, if persisted in, would result in revolution ; and in London one day of it would fill the next day s newspapers with indignant protests, and in a week s time the matter would be under the control of the police. But in this strange republic these good- natured people are slaves to every conceiv able form of political and financial job bery, and no one protests. It may be the 22 First Impressions of New York land of freedom, but it certainly is not the land of freemen. Personal comfort, per sonal privacy, the right to go and come, and to live as one prefers, without com ment, and even without newspaper noto riety, are as impossible as in Russia, or in Armenia. Each one is so taken up with his own and somebody s business other than his own, that he has no time, and no vigor, left to defend what in every other civilized country are deemed to be the most precious personal prerogatives. " Why does no one protest ? M I say to Protests one American after another. It is useless, they tell me. The protestor is unpopular here. There are too many people inter ested to keep the people slaves, to permit anyone to express dissent. The news papers tar and feather such a one with abusive and vituperative rhetoric, his friends laugh at him, and all those who are acquainted with him hint broadly that he is of an irritable, testy disposition. He is told that he had better take up his resi dence in one of the "effete monarchies of Europe," where such things are better reg- 2 3 America and the Americans Why so much A tnericnt money is spent in ulated. The result is, that while Europe ships her gallows birds, paupers, and in competents here, and the commercial coy otes of all nations swarm in, to oust the natives from their rightful gains, represen tatives of three or four of the wealthiest families and many others of minor social and financial repute, are living more and more months of each year in Europe, and some of them live there altogether. It is said that a hundred million dollars, and more, are spent in Europe every year by Americans, who, as the years go by, go more often, stay longer, and spend more. If wealth, privacy, personal comfort, and personal liberty are not protected here, those who wish to possess them in security will infallibly go elsewhere. Sharp and quick-witted as the Yankee is reputed to be, he has not seen yet even the mere commercial disadvantages of permitting his native land to be ruled by the rough, to the extinction and the ultimate exclu sion of the gentle. Thus are my impressions first gained, and then rudely contradicted. It seems 24 First Impressions of New York impossible to reconcile such experiences as those of the landing in New York and the journey in the tram-car with the elegant comfort and convenience of the hotel. The one set of experiences, all rough, raw, and lawless ; the others dominated by effi ciency and method. But one sees at last the solution of this problem of contradictions. And the solu tion is, namely, that everything requiring nicety of mechanical means, everything Machinery that can be done by steam or electricity, ?<///.** or gas, or by harnessing the powers of nat ure, is done well, sometimes superlatively well ; while anything demanding person al service, or the training, discipline, and courtesy of men and women acting as ser vants, in either a high or low capacity, is done meanly, carelessly, irresponsibly, and without any sense of honorable allegiance to a master. Here again it is forgotten, not only by The point the foreigner, but by the native American as well, that it is only just a hundred years ago that it was with the utmost diffi culty that New York State was persuaded 25 America and the Americans to join in the ratification and acceptance of the Constitution. The people feared that by so doing they would lose something of their independence. This spirit is still rampant to-day, and nowhere more notice ably so than among the ignorant foreign element, who, escaping from the tyranny of their own incompetency at home, make pretence of demanding a personal liberty here, which results only in lawlessness and license. This is a new country. Land is plenty and cheap. I am assured that no industri ous, sober, and honest man need lack the necessaries and ev<. " some of the luxuries of life. But, in spite of this, it is estimated strange that 3,ooo,ooo persons are supported in prevalence . , . , of poverty, whole or in part each year, and at a cost to somebody of 250,000,000 francs for main tenance, and 250,000,000 francs in loss of productive power. In this great State of New York alone, the cost of dependent, defective, and delinquent persons is over 60,000,000 francs per annum. I go to bed thinking that civilization by machinery is not an assured success. But 26 First Impressions of New York who knows ! In this country of anoma lies and contradictions, I may go to bed a week hence convinced that I am wrong. At any rate, here is an interesting ex periment in government and in social life. There are no slaves, and in the European sense except in half a dozen of the larger seaboard cities no servants. Every man here is striving to be his own master, and consequently most of them must be their own servants. In the Eastern part of the country they are already struggling with the illogical problem : How can your political equal be incipient your social or domestic inferior ? If all de- Soctalt5m serve the same comforts and the same re spect, who is to black the boots and wash the dishes ? Discontent ripens fast in this atmosphere, and no wonder ! During every succeeding political contest each man is The hood- crowned. Between the political contests Z%%? the crowns are hung up behind the door, but the sight of them makes men wish to wear them all the time. An effusive re ception awaits the political prestidigitator who promises to juggle all the hewers of 27 America and the Americans wood and carriers of water into perpetual crown-wearers ! Alas for the republic when such a trickster appears ! He will probably be voted down the first time, but he will inevitably reappear. Ill Social Side of New York -DAY my New York friend ar rives from Washington. He has written of his plans for me for the next few days. They include luncheons, dinners, the opera, and three dances. Verily, they entertain au galop, these good Americans. First I lunch with him at a club on Fifth Avenue. He tells me it is mostly frequented by the younger set of men, and some young I meet half a dozen of them. It is the Yorkers fashion now, he tells me, to be rather ag gressively American here. I am not made aware of this, however, by their conversa tion. Perhaps they suit their after-lunch eon-cigarette chat to what they deem to be my taste rather than theirs. Certainly they are profusely hospitable, and alto gether at my service, and among the most agreeable is a brother-in-law of Madam 29 America and the Americans R., whom, he tells me, I shall meet to night at the opera. The conversation is much that of idle men all over the world. I remark upon this cosmopolitanism to my friend, who hints rather broadly that this apparent de tachment of mind is assumed for my ben efit, and thereupon describes some of the men more in detail. One is the editor of a magazine which is much given to articles by English noblemen, but a very good magazine withal, two or three numbers of which I have since read. Another is in a large banking-house downtown, and comes up to luncheon at the request of my friend. and their Still another is the son of a man who ancestors. twenty-five years ago was an unknown law yer in a Western country town ; to-day he is the confidential attorney of several great financiers, and his son is an amiable idler. Another married a daughter of one of the two great millionnaire households here, and spends her money with eccentric lavish- ness. Another is the grandson of a Scotch weaver who introduced a process of carpet- making that has built up one of the great- 30 Social Side of New York est businesses in New York. Another is the son of a Western man who made mill ions by the invention and exploitation of a machine for cutting wheat. The father of another discovered a process for coating pills, and his family mounts the golden stair of social prominence pellet by pellet. I cannot understand how it is that cer tain American critics sneer at this, and love to point out the grandfatherlessness of The charm New York s social life. To me it is as a g%n dream, as an incitement to ambition, as a a magnificent social panorama gilded by the commercial prowess of vigorous men. As we leave the club one of these young men points across the way, and, as he says " good-by," tells us he is going for a shave. The phrase, " going for a shave," "Going for catches my ear ; I am soon enlightened. These correct and well-dressed young men, many of them, are shaved each day by a public barber. Some days later I go to the same shop to have my hair cut, and there I see rows of small porcelain cups with the names of their owners in gilt let ters upon them. Some of the names are America and the Americans those of men whom I have already met. Young gentlemen come in, take off their collars and neck-cloths, and their faces are daubed with soap and rubbed by the hands of the barber and shaved. They are then wiped off with a towel, powdered, and, without any further ablutions on their part, they go thence to make love, or to kiss their wives or their children, for all I know. This seems to me horribly dirty, and painfully disagreeable. Many men, I am told, never complete their toilet at home in the morning, but are shaved down town each morning. Their faces are pawed and patted and powdered by a negro, a German, or an Italian, and so left for the day. As I sit at dinner in the evening at the table of the weaver s son, I cannot forbear wondering how many of the gentlemen present were shaved by Germans, how many by Irishmen, how many by Italians, and so on. The dinner is a very sumptuous affair, with flowers in profusion indeed flowers are bought and sold and seen here as in 3 2 Social Side of New York no other city in the world, the roses are more beautiful than any I have ever seen elsewhere, and cost, I am told, at certain seasons of the year, fabulous prices. We are to go from dinner to the opera, hence the ladies are in gala costumes. The hostess actually wears a crown of diamonds An Ameri can coronet. on her head, and though none of the others wears so conspicuous an ornament, still the display of jewels is imposing. But the crown keeps catching my eyes, dazzling them and my understanding at the same time. " Who is this lady? Is she a for eigner ? I ask of my friend as soon as we are alone. No, I learn that she is far from being a foreign aristocrat. Indeed it is only within the last ten years that she has been known, even in New York s more ex clusive circle. She married a rich man, who has grown richer in trade, and she has, by natural diplomacy and by not stickling at the quality of some of the at tention shown her, risen to her present position. She is certainly very charming, and her affairs are not my business, though from the stories that are offered me about 33 America and the Americans her at intervals during my stay, her affairs seem to have been the business of a good many. Leanings Though this is SL republic, though I read towards , ,.,... aristocra- in the papers each morning abusive tirades on English ways and English customs and English noblemen, I recall that after Washington was made President, there was immediately a long and wordy wrangle in the new congress in regard to the title he was to bear. Evidently some of these rather boastful republicans still hunger for the flesh-pots of the titled Egyptians. In one of the large jeweller s shops there is a special de partment of Heraldry, if you please, where these republicans have coats-of-arms put together for them. At the door of the opera-house, on coming out, I see scores of liveried men-servants, some of them with cockades in their hats, and on harnesses and carriage-doors, verily, Thefts I see crests and coats-of-arms, some of Htrtud t them too big even for real noblemen. office. pm ^ Mrg gharp ^ Mfs Green> Mrg White> Mrs. Black, Mrs. Jones, pray, where did 34 Social Side of New York ure of stars andgar- your right to the coronet, the crest, and the coat-of-arms come in ? Do you even know what the various symbols, signs, and figures mean ? I have my doubts, truly ! It is surely an American idea that pellets, - , -, i i or carpets, or furs, or ready-made clothing, or reaping-machines, or dry-goods, or pat ent medicines, or tea, or sugar, or hides, or railroad bonds, carried to the nth power, confer patents of nobility on their posses sors or their legatees. But how else can these people have any right to them? And why, oh, why, do they want them at all ? And there are titles, too, yes, titles galore, among these boastful republicans. At the little luncheon-party one young man was invariably addressed as "General," and another, who lives on his wife s money and other people s ideas, was called "Colonel." They had been on somebody s staff, I was told in explanation. Even the newspapers are punctilious in Punctn- their bestowal of titles. "The Hon. JTSS?. Patrick Divver " did this, " ex -Attorney- General So-and-so " did that ; " President Jones" said this, "ex-Secretary of the In- 35 America and the Americans Highfalu- tin nomen clature. Secret love of titles. terior" said that; "Colonel J." and " General H." and "Governor X. and "His Excellency the Governor of M." and "ex-Boss C." and "Doctor Y." all clergymen are given the degree of Doctor of Divinity, I notice and " Professor N." have arrived at such and such an hotel. Then these good plain people have so cieties without number. There are Officers of the Legion of Honor, Comrades of the Grand Army, Sons of the Revolution, Knights of Pythias, Daughters of the Revo lution, Colonial Dames, Societies of the Dutch, Societies of New England, the South ern Society, and how many more I know not. Then each of these has its ribbon or its button or its badge, and in no country in Europe do you hear so many titles, or see so many insignia worn. This is all very pretty fooling, and harm less enough were it frank and outspoken. But it is not. These same people toady to foreign noblemen as do no other people in the world. Politically they are loud, blat ant even, in the reiteration of their repub licanism ; but socially they are tuft-hunters, y 36 Social Side of New York not to say flunkeys of the most pronounced type. I am a Frenchman, one of my an cestors was beheaded in the revolution, but I am a republican. Locked away in our poor, tumbled-down chateau are ribbons, Faded crosses, buttons, and swords won and worn gory by men who bore my name when the great Louis, who could not write his own name, was putting the first wedge in, that was at last to tumble the monarchy to the ground. The young friend with whom I have just been lunching will tell you as much. But Dieu m^ en garde from all this sham aristo cracy, from all this frippery and foppery of nobility in a republic. Some of the titles bestowed upon differ ent officers of these organizations I have mentioned, out-do even the ascriptions to the Almighty by a negro preacher at a camp- meeting. And worse yet. Do we, some of us, of older nations laugh at the rudeness and awkwardness of democratic manners? Ungenerous What then is to be said of these people in criticism the East who laugh and sneer at the un sophisticated manners of their own brethren who dwell west of the Mississippi and the 37 America and the Americans French po liteness. A merican chivalry to women. Rocky Mountains? Certain Western men came on to New York, while I was there, to start a Western Mining Exchange. The local newspapers made fun of the costumes of their wives and sisters, gave exaggerated illustrations of the costumes of the men, and were positively hilarious over their simple luncheon, their awkward manners, and their inelegant diction. If the Paris press treated a party of tour ists from Lyons or Marseilles in this fash ion, well-bred Frenchmen would stare and stammer, in amazement and disgust, when they opened their newspapers. Fancy put ting the wives and sisters of your own countrymen, from another part of the coun try, into the pillory of newspaper carica ture ! These same editors, too, offer their columns as rewards to those who can lift them and their wives into the social swim. They pay this one, and that, for articles, and in return expect to be invited to din ners and drawing-rooms ! I had heard much of the American chival ry to women of how they could walk the streets and travel alone. Let us be frank 38 Social Side of New York and say that it is all nonsense ! The newspapers make free with the names of ladies, and drag wives and mothers and sisters into the shambles of every politi cal controversy, every social contretemps. While among the better classes, in their clubs and drawing-rooms, one hears hints, scandals, innuendoes, and stortes and most of them about the ladies in their own circle such as would prepare the way for a dozen duels a week in my own country. The most shamelessly shocking periodi cal that it has ever been my misfortune to read, is published in New York each week. It devotes itself openly to the libellous and the licentious. The names of "society" people are to be found in almost every paragraph, and the most prurient details of every known, or suspected, scandal are blazed forth to the world in its pages. Our most suggestive pictorial French papers, highly seasoned and colored though they be, are as the Gospels to Rabelais, when Ribald compared with this sheet wherein jokes about ladies underclothing, with the ladies 39 America and the Americans names printed in full, are sometimes a feat ure of its lascivious ribaldry and yet one society nobody is shot ! There are societies for the prevention of cruelty to children, for the prevention of cruelty to animals, for the prohibition of intemperance, for the relief of the poor, for the prevention of the sale of obscene literature societies, in deed, without number, for the amusement of the rich at the expense of the poor, but no men and women strong enough to prevent this hebdomadal debauch of every body s morals who has ten cents to spend. All these political and social and moral contradictions and anomalies are amus ing to me, but if I be not mistaken they portend dire results in the near future to this confident, and not infrequently arro gant, republic. I could wish it were other wise. Every Frenchman wishes it were A French- otherwise. For "on aime quelqu? un toujours man s view . _ if it. centre quelqu un, and no country in Europe would be so directly affected by the failure of republican manners and institutions here as we should be. For the anti -republican countries all about us, Germany, England, 40 Social Side of New York Austria, and Italy, would point a moral and adorn a tale, for the benefit of republi can France, should republican institutions founder and fail in America. IV Public and Private Functions [E were going to the opera, when I forgot the opera in remember ing other things. Once there, it is a brilliant scene. In these The opera, matters, as in their fine buildings and their sumptuous hotels, this nation has caught up in the race with Europe. Music, scen ery, and singing are of the best, and the audience, if anything, is even more gor geously gowned and bejewelled than in Paris or London, and far more so than at a similar affair in poor bankrupt Rome, or even in St. Petersburg. If the precious stones and laces are what they look to be, these Americans must spend fortunes upon their women. Madam R. is not in her box until late, but at last I am presented to her. She laughs good-naturedly at dear Fifine s anx iety to have a description of her, and bids 42 Public and Private Functions me come to see her out of town, some where on the Hudson River, where she has her home. She hopes that if I am to describe her, I am not intending to publish my diary-notes. I reply that I am incapa ble of writing a book, even though I wished to do so. She tells me that Bourget s book was of small value, because most of his impressions seem to have been filtered through a Boston and Newport filter before they were printed. "And, you know," she adds, ( Boston is no longer America ! I stroll about downstairs, and, among other things, I notice that each programme has on it a numbered list of private boxes, and opposite the numbers the names of the occupants. As each box in the house is plainly numbered on the printed plan, this makes it possible for everyone with a programme to identify the people in the boxes. I understand less and less this practi cally universal desire to exploit one s self, to Seifadver- reveal one s identity even at the opera, to * have one s name in the papers, to have one s likeness published. Whether it be the 43 America and the Americans levelling-down process in a democracy which makes everyone eager in conse quence to boost his head and shoulders up over the average line, or the lack of social confidence and security in people who have no well-defined classes, so that each one feels it incumbent upon him to assert himself always, and everywhere, I am not sure ; but whatever be the cause of this evident love of publicity, the result is very bourgeois indeed. In every civilization of any age, it is the desire of pretty much everybody to shield Privacy his life and that of his family, and to live "ity. *" part of the time, at least, quite on one side of the roar of the business, social, and politi cal torrent. A small house away from the crowd is more highly esteemed than a large house in the crowd. In short, only those who cannot avoid it live all the time in the ruck of people. But it is quite different here. The popu lation of the great cities increases enor mously every year. I was told by a well- known worker at the social problems of New York the figures which give the pro- 44 Public and Private Functions portion of the people of New York City who live in hotels, boarding-houses, and Boarding- tenements, and one is amazed at the num- ketcU. " ber. From these figures I regret not having them here in Paris, but as I jotted down notes from day to day in America, I had not the smallest intention of using them in this way I remember that it ap peared that only a very small percentage of the people live in separate dwelling-houses. Even people whose incomes permit it, pre fer to live in hotels rather than in small houses of their own in the suburbs. This is a sure sign of a superficial people, and of a thin culture, for it is the mark of the uncultivated to be uneasy and discon tented away from the crowd, just as it is the mark of a more happy breeding to be discontented, if one is forced by circum stances to be forever in it. This straining to make one s self conspic uous is apparent not only in the numer ous likenesses and the columns of person al paragraphs in the newspapers, but it is Newspaper evinced by the startling extravagance of * dress not only in public places, but in the 45 America and the Americans shops and on the streets. Velvets, furs, laces, jewels, may be seen on the streets and in the tram-cars, morning, noon, and night of every day. The ladies whom I saw at the opera in all the brilliancy of court costumes are to be met with they or their sisters of less social distinction on the streets in costumes which, if less brilliant as to color, are no less costly as to texture and variety of fabric. It has been my good fortune to know the streets of Rome, Paris, London, St. Peters burg, Amsterdam, and Vienna, but there is nothing approaching to the display of fine ra ^ ment tnere tnat one sees in New York. dress. What would my French friends think of a lady walking to and from church in a cos tume composed entirely of fur jacket and skirt as well ; of another in velvet, draped profusely with lace, and a bonnet of jet with pink and white plumes, and, were I a mo diste, I could enumerate many more which struck my unaccustomed eye as being equal ly extravagant and in equally bad taste. When I pointed out to two Americans, with whom I was walking, this ostentatious 46 Public and Private Functions finery worn by so many women on the streets, I asked to what class they belonged, and how they lived at home. They told Lack of me that a fair proportion of them were Jew- ^"me** esses, and that many more of them were people who lived in boarding-houses and hotels, and others, people who lived on a very small scale at home, with one, two, or three servants in their households. The sole social recreation of many of them is this parading of the streets, visiting the Display theatres, and invading the shops. There is a large middle class here, the men of which are busy from morning till night, \/ and weary when they reach home. They have little social experience, and hence they find even the most elementary social duties irksome ; the consequence is that most of their women-folk are left to them selves for social diversion, and they take it in its more barbaric forms only. The dinner- giving and dinner-going, which is so prev alent here among a certain class, is largely confined to that class. This very common form of hospitality, even in the country towns of England, and among our large 47 America and the Americans middle class in France, is narrowed down to a few, comparatively speaking, here. This is owing to the lack of knowledge in such matters of the great majority, and to the scarcity, and abnormally high wages, of trained, or even untrained, servants. Social in- One might live a long time in London, experience. GI[ . n p ar j s? b e f ore seeing a guest at a twelve- o clock wedding in his evening clothes unless he were a French official appearing in his official capacity, as the President of the Republic at the races for example but I saw this social gaucherie at a wedding here. There is much latent ignorance of this kind, which seldom reveals itself, be cause its victims take pains to avoid appear ing where they know they are on unsafe ground. This lack of social training and social experience though there is no lack of so- Great social cial aptitude, for I defy Europe to produce aptitude. more charming hostesses than half a dozen women I could name here, who I am told had been nowhere, seen nobody, and had nothing, until of a sudden, marriage, or the " ticker " in Wall Street, or an oil-well, or 48 Public and Private Functions a mine, landed them at their opportunity with overflowing purses make even the more common forms of social intercourse comparatively rare, rare indeed to an ex tent I was unprepared for. Thousands and thousands of families in even the larger cities of America, having an income amply sufficient, never dress in Artificial , . social life. the evening, never serve wine on their tables, never have a dinner served in courses, a la Russe, when by themselves, and never attempt to have their friends to dinner without calling in the men, the means, and the menu from a restaurant. This makes life rather arid for the women. But to me the sadder side of it is, what I have noted in other departments of American life, the undemocratic phase of it. These people are not willing to be themselves, to dine out, and to have others Lack of s to dine, to entertain, and to be entertained, in a manner suitable to their modest means. They live meanly, that they may dress ex travagantly on the street, and from time to time entertain on a scale that is utterly un related to their everyday life. I know hun- 49 America and the Americans dreds of menages in France, and some score or more in England and Italy ah, how often I have been told, sometimes twitted with the remark, that we have no word for 1 home" in French, until I have been tempted to reply : " Thank Heaven, no such word, and no such place, as is repre sented by that word here, in many cases " where one goes home every night to a pleasant little dinner, quite suitable to be served to one or two friends, should they appear, and where the proprietors have less than 30,000 francs a year. I dare affirm that it would be impossible to find a pro- protionate number here among people of the same income. On the other hand, the number of so- din- called public dinners, where men, in num ber from twenty-five to five hundred, meet to dine together, and to hear speeches as they smoke and drink afterward, is greater, far greater than anywhere else in the world. The Irish dine; the Germans dine; the English dine ; the Scandinavians dine ; men from all the States and territories of the Union resident in New York, dine to- Public and Private Functions gather ; the graduates of all the different colleges dine; the bankers, the brokers, the jewellers, the travelling salesmen, the journalists, the athletic clubs, the Sons of the Revolution and the Fathers of the Re bellion, and even the clergymen, dine in this public fashion. This style of entertainment is an Ameri can institution. It grows out of two con ditions. First, the barrenness of much the greater part of the domestic social life ; and second, the astonishing and admirable glib- ness of speech of the Americans as a people. Some of this speaking I heard through Public i s the courtesy of my friend the editor, and I read a great deal of it, for I devoured American newspapers and periodicals dur ing my stay there. When one hears these speeches it matters little by whom, for they pretty much all speak well one is a little jealous of a race which seems to be en dowed by the gods with a gift so rare ; but when one reads them, one is rather sad than jealous. Nine -tenths of them are as sounding brass. They are for the ears for long ears not for the mind. A America and the Americans French politician who should treat his con stituents to the quality of oratory that evi dently suffices here, would be ridiculed by every journal in France; and in England such an one would be quietly shelved at the instance of his own party leaders. One understands at last how there can be so much speaking here, when the speeches are analyzed, for most of them are Gusts of mere verbal exercises mere gusts of ver- "verbosity* , _ T , . , bosity. Not that one wishes to give, or to leave, the impression that there are no good speakers, and no good speaking, among the Americans. That would be altogether false. When one has enjoyed the friendship, and heard the speech, both private and public, of Mr. James Russell Lowell, one may not say that. Mr. Evarts, too, I heard in Paris on one occasion, and Mr. Joseph Choate and the President of the Harvard University I heard speak in New York, and these men all rank with the very best men of any nation, one might almost say, indeed, of any time. But much of this speaking falls under one and the same head. Like 52 Public and Private Functions the paltry social life at home, and the occa sional inappropriate display outside ; like the meanness of one s personal surround ings, and the exaggerated extravagance of dress in public ; so this speaking, much of The it, is but an insincere laying claim to what y J one wishes to appear rather than a mod est exhibition of what one is or knows. There is a demagoguery of dress and man ners and speech, as well as of political ac tion, and it is here, alas ! in this republic, that one finds it in its most disagreeable forms. No one would belittle the high claims to sustained and brilliant speech of Webster, Clay, Calhoun, of Rufus Choate, Edward Everett, Wendell Phillips, of Beecher, Storrs, Phillips Brooks, and many others. I am not denying that there have been, and are, great orators in this country. But, owing to the Public School system here, no country has, or has had, such an amount The home of superficial and uncritical culture spread +gog*t. over such an enormous geographical area. This condition of things intellectual makes this the happiest hunting - ground for the 53 America and the Americans mountebank, the demagogue, and the vari ous other shapes which verbosity may take. Minds trained just enough to enjoy gaudy epigrams are easily enslaved and carried away by almost every gust of words that blows. Hence it is a great tempta- Tke orator- tion to be what is called an orator, and icalcrop, , j rri orators abound in consequence. They are one of the crops here, like wheat and cotton! There is scarcely a political campaign goes by without the appearance of " Women Orators," " Boy Orators," "Boy Preach ers," " Boy Evangelists," and many other varieties of orator, whose silence would be golden indeed. No matter in what de partment of life a man may succeed, he is called upon to speak, and because he knows about one particular thing, he is called upon to make speeches upon all sorts of subjects utterly unrelated to his specialty. The op portunity to advertise one s self is looked upon as the most valuable reward that a grateful democracy can offer in return for valuable services received. 54 V Social Contrasts AST night we dined at the A smart house of the representative of one of the wealthiest, perhaps the wealthiest, families of this republic our host is a woman and a widow. Some twenty or more people were present, and the plate, the porcelain, the glass, the naperie were the most magnificent I have ever seen on a private table. Some of the same people were there whom I have met elsewhere, and, in addition, two titled Eng lishmen, one of whom took the hostess in to dinner, despite the fact that a distin guished American, a member of one of the late administrations, was present. But I am beginning to see that " Yan kee Doodle comes to town a-riding on his pony " mainly in the newspapers, certainly not in American drawing-rooms. It was not a long dinner, but all the 55 America and the Americans seasons and all points of the compass con tributed to the bill-of-fare. I am told, and one need only dine out here, or examine the daily bills-of-fare at American the best restaurants to believe it, that New market*. y^ . g ^ ^ market in thfi WQrld> The variety of game, fish, fruit, fresh vegetables, and shell-fish that is evidently procurable here in season and out of season is un equalled. Some of the My companion at table was the beauti ful lady of the coronet. On the other side of me sat a languid lady who manoeuvred the conversation into a confession that she was an authoress. Alas for me ! I have forgotten her name, her nom de guerre and the titles of her books. Of the other peo ple who attracted my attention, one was a banker, who is also a politician, owner of a racing-stable, and a dog-fancier ; another was a clergyman, who also turned out to be an Englishman, though in charge of a large church here ; another was the wife of a Western man of mines, and of fabulous wealth, whose origin, I was told, was of the most humble ; and two more were the 56 Social Contrasts wife and daughter of a citizen of Chicago, who, having made a fortune there, from behind several hundred yards of dry-goods counters, gives these ladies the benefit thereof. But, be it said, no one would have sus- Good ma pected these things of any of the people mentioned unless it be perhaps of the lady from Chicago unless one were told by their friends. The men do not un buckle their revolvers and put them on the table, and the women do not eat with their knives; on the contrary, there is a certain subdued air about it all, as though the participants at these functions were somewhat awed by their grandeur and solemnity. But even this wears off at the dance to which we all adjourn later. In a public place, part hall, part res taurant, but handsomely decorated, and adorned with plants and flowers, we danced or rather they danced for I soon America* found myself unacquainted with the mys teries of American dancing. It is different from ours, and different from the English, 57 America and the Americans and German, also, and I must admit more graceful, though in the early morning there was a good deal of romping. Comparisons are always very shaky bridges between one nation and another, and so I will not say that at these affairs Vive la they drink more or less than in France, or in England, but they certainly drink a good deal, even the women, and principally of very cold champagne. It is the dry, brill iant, sparkling wine, which is much like the climate here. May they continue to love it, and we be spared the phylloxera to make it for them. I bade my dinner -hostess good-night, and also several other hostesses, who, it appears, are the official hostesses of the ball, good night as well, and returned to my friend s apartments. To-morrow I go with him to his father s house in the country, and from there to spend the Sunday at a large club in the country which he has described to me, and which I shall soon see for myself. We spend the Friday afternoon and A home in night at the country-place of my friend s ^country. ^ . g & beautiful ^ wild country a ll 58 Social Contrasts about us, and the first really quiet and well-regulated abode away from the crowd that I have visited. Herfe again is a con tradiction of my impressions, for the house hold and all its appurtenances, the roads and the quiet of the woods, bespeak the choice of a cultured mind. All this is a thousand years in advance of the landing- stage, the tram - car, and the profusely dressed ladies of the New York streets. On the following day we go to spend the Sunday at a club which turns out to be unique in my experience as a travel ler. Several thousand acres of beautiful woods, with a chain of crystal lakes in the American centre, and beautifully kept roads around intkece** the lakes and through the woods, and the try hill-sides dotted here and there, within this immense enclosure, with the cottages, villas, chateaux, and colonial mansions of the members, and in the centre of it all a large and well-furnished club-house. The instigator of this great social enter prise is an American who made his own fortune. There are fishing, boating, and out-of-door sports, both in summer and 59 America and the Americans winter. There are some seventy houses here, owned and built by different people, who, I understand, buy the land on which they build of the club corporation, of which the projector is the permanent presi dent. The whole great park is policed and lighted and generally cared for by the club. We get ourselves comfortably settled at the club-house, where there are rooms for guests, and then by telephone my friend calls up horses, and with two others we go for a drive upon the broad, smooth roads. These roads are the best I have seen anywhere in America, and equal to those that Napoleon built for us, which are the best in the world. A reminis- As we are driving I tell my friends of .Sickens. how, when driving in Central Park, New York, I saw a groom on the back of a cart driven by two ladies, who not only chewed tobacco but squirted the juice on the road Servant? behind him. "Now," I remark, " if I should tell of such an incident, I should be called an exaggerator and a detractor of the country ! " "Ah," they replied, " you would give the impression by relating such 60 Social Contrasts an incident that it is typical, while as a matter of fact none of us has ever seen anything of the kind." I cannot help thinking of this incident, however, as an illustration of what I see and hear in this country on all sides of me. It is a fairy-land of contrasts. One moment Contrasts. you are tumbled through streets full of ruts and holes, the next moment you are ushered into the seclusion of as luxuriously ap pointed an hotel as is to be found in the wide world ; in the morning you spend half an hour in a torture-chamber, shot along on an endless chain and filled with tumbling human beings ; in the evening you dine off gold plate, and drink out of crystal vessels ; as you walk up the streets you are accosted by a shivering, ragged, hollow-cheeked mortal, who claims that he has no place to sleep, and has had nothing to eat ; in another moment you are in a palace, and from scores of boxes women lean forth, with the price of thousands of good dinners on their arms, shoulders, and in their hair. You are driving in comfort over well-kept roads, in a magnificent park, 61 America and the Americans Street sprinkling By tobacco. Dispropor tionate wages. and the groom of the fashionably dressed lady driving in front of you squirts to bacco-juice under the noses of your horses. There are thousands of men and women without work and without money in New York, and yet to get trained servants is a problem so difficult of solution, that many people, I am told, have given up in despair and sought refuge in hotels and apartment- houses. Read some of these figures, my economi cal compatriots, and be satisfied to stay at home. A good cook, female, is paid from one hundred to one hundred and seventy- five francs a month, and in large estab lishments much more, and, of course, has her board and lodging besides. Waitresses, laundresses, chamber-maids receive from seventy-five to one hundred and twenty-five francs ; coachmen, from two hundred to as much as three hundred and seventy-five francs ; grooms and gardeners, from one hundred and twenty-five to two hundred and fifty ; and in-door men-servants there are comparatively few of these from one hundred and twenty-five to two hun- 62 Social Contrasts dred and fifty francs, and more, a month. For these wages you get, mostly, only a mechanical, uninterested, and impersonal indifferent service at least so I am told by the Ameri cans themselves, for of course my small ex perience in such matters is worthless ; al though in a large establishment at Newport, where there must have been at least ten servants, my clothes were neither folded nor brushed, and my patent-leather evening shoes were returned to me nicely blacked instead of polished the morning after I had put them out. Women, and men as well, seek positions Dislike of in swarms where they are paid less than good servants are paid. The trained nurses in the State hospitals, for example, do not receive as much in wages as the chamber maids in well-to-do families being differ ent from the private trained nurses, who charge exorbitantly ; the thousands of shop and factory girls have longer hours, must board and lodge themselves, and yet receive smaller wages. One hears complaints in England, and in France, and sometimes in Italy more 63 America and tbe Americans te crerners .--e pcir.t. but in those incidental ir. i ; : :;^ re i: is 2. crr.:ir.er.t ir.i clas of sen-acts, ; here by the high er that greater ex- --. -. : Social Contrasts tomed to the care of, and the responsi bility for, servants. It is only in the South that they have had servants for two centuries. In every house that 1 have been in, I have taken pains to ask my host if any of his servants in doors or out are the children of former sen-ants of his, or of his family, and never have I received an answer in the affirma tive. I recall that when it was proposed to pat in uniform the men who clean the streets in New York, there was a series of jibes and jeers and sneers. And this in a republic ! This in a land where, at least, one would suppose that every form of honest toil would be honored, or, at least, respected. Believe it not, ye toilers in other lands who look with longing eyes toward this land of the free. No monarchy, no empire in Europe, so exaggerates the value of success, finan cial success especially, and so degrades the drudgery of commonplace labor as do the people of this nation. In England the Queen pays her own way on every railway journey she takes; in 6s America and the Americans France the President of the Republic does the same and only a limited number of men who are, strictly speaking, officials, travel free ; but here there are hundreds of rich , men connected with railways, steam-boats, express or telegraph companies, who have passes and who travel free, send their packages free, their telegrams free, and are accorded privileges that no sovereign in Europe would dream of demanding for himself. Great pri-v- The rich tax the poor here by special / ileges of .... j i r / wealth. legislation and by a certain freemasonr)V among themselves, much as the powerful used to tax the poor in my own country, by sheer force of arms. This is one reason why personal service of any kind is so dif ficult to procure, because personal service and menial labor, while studiously ap plauded politically, are universally under valued socially. These people get higher wages here, but they save no more, and they have far less consideration shown them, and they have less amusement and less comfort, and, pray, what is the ultimate value of higher wages " higher wages," how often 66 Social Contrasts it has been dinned into my ears, almost as often in fact as the statement that we have no word for " home " in French if there results not more consideration, more com fort, more leisure ? Money is not as valu able as water in a desert. High wages are useless if you cannot buy consideration, rational amusement, and a competency for old age with them. For the lower classes this country seems in some sort to be a desert, socially, where they are thirsty for NO just the cold water of their happier, though //* perhaps less apparently prosperous, life at home. " Why, you know, sir," said an English groom to me here, " a dollar honly buys what a shillin does at ome, sir, and the masters take no interest in hour amusements as they does at ome ! " VI Conflicting Evidence JY two days at the great park in the country were of the most pleasant. At this time of the year many people from New York go there to spend the Saturday and Sunday. A relic of In New York City one cannot " go for a ism. a shave after one o clock on Sunday, and all the shops, including the restaurants, cafs, and saloons, are closed by law, so far as the sale of anything potable is considered. But an hour s ride from New York, in almost any direction, are numerous country clubs which, in the last ten years, have become very popular, and where one may indulge in out-of-door sports to the heart s con tent. At Newport, too, I found people playing tennis and golf on the Sunday. But no poor man can take his wife and chil dren to a beer-garden, or drive or walk into 68 Conflicting Evidence the country to sup, and have a glass of beer or wine. When our Bernhardt was here, there was Bemhardt much discussion as to whether she was a proper person to be received, and ladies who gave her receptions, gave it out that no unmarried girls were to be invited to meet her! This aspersion of* the char acter of the married girls was passed over without any chuckling or laughter, and yet these Americans often speak of the national talent for seeing, and making jokes. Poor Guilbert received much gratuitous advertising because she appeared once or twice in private before a select number of the < leaders of New York Society. And yet the newspapers who assailed both her and the ladies who went to hear her, pub lish Sunday editions replete with illustra tions and paragraphs concerning criminals of high and low degree. When the statue of the Greek Slave was exhibited in Cincinnati, a delegation of clergymen was sent to view it, that they might make a report to their presumably 69 America and the Americans Chaste Diana. Hypocrisy or self- deception. less expert fellow-citizens as to the propri ety of going to see it. An undraped statue of Diana on the top of the Madison Square Garden in New York caused much criticism on the score of its indecency ; and yet at several of the public balls, one of which I attended for an hour or two, women appeared in costumes, and behaved in a manner, that made my youthful memories of the Mabille seem sombre and saltless. So far as my own experience goes, it has seemed to me that much of the immorality here among the upper classes is rather mental than physical. The intercourse be tween men and women is very free, or so it appeared to me j but the worst feature of it is the stories and slanders that they themselves circulate about one another. A certain unconscious hypocrisy is preva lent among the people of all classes. An instance of this is the constant reference one hears I suppose for the benefit of the poorer classes to the immense cost of the standing armies in France, in Germany, and in Italy, and how men are obliged to 70 Conflicting Evidence serve in them at an immense loss to agri culture and commerce. But place the figures of the cost to France of her army alongside of these figures, my French friends : In the year 1880 the United States paid 250,802 Pensions. pensioners the sum of 286,202,700 francs. In the year 1885 the United States paid 345,125 pensioners the sum of 328,468,530 francs. In the year 1890 the United States paid 537,944 pensioners the sum of 532,469,450 francs. In the year 1895 the United States paid 970,524 pensioners the sum of 704,796,805 francs. Less than thirty thousand persons short of a million, in this total population of sixty- seven millions, receive pensions, and these pensions constitute a drain on the national exchequer each year of 704,796,805 francs. If one deducts the negroes and the for eign population settled here since the war, who of course receive no pensions, it is easy to see that almost one out of every forty-five or fifty of all the inhabitants is paid a bounty by the State. This sum paid out in pensions each year is almost one-half of the total value of the exports America and the Americans from the United States to the United Kingdom of Great Britain in one year, and Great Britain is by far their largest customer, and is more than one-eighth of the sum of the total domestic exports for the year. As a colossal piece of political extravagance, this surpasses anything ever gance . * dreamed of in the history of nations tip to this time. While the Democratic party robs New York City, the Republican party robs New York State, and some of the above-men tioned pensioners rob the United States, the people in Cincinnati are trying to de termine whether they are too good to look at the Greek Slave, and the citizens of New York are blushing with shame at the sight of Sarah Bernhardt in respectable drawing- rooms. And these are the people who gave us Mark Twain, Artemus Ward, and Oliver Wendell Holmes ! Pray, what has become of the national sense of humor ? Lacking in The nation, like so many of the individ- economy. ua ] s composing it, has grown rich with start ling rapidity, but they do not know how to take care of, or how to use, their money, 72 Conflicting Evidence Economy, the touchstone of all the arts of civilization, is an unknown quantity here. Said a distinguished American publisher to me : " The people in New York whom I pity are not the poor, not the laboring men, and the small people on small in comes ; but those who have incomes ranging from four to seven thousand dollars a year. There is no place for them in this great city, it appears. Rents are too high, the wages of servants are too high, fuel, food, and clothing are too high, to permit them to live with such surroundings and such comforts as their incomes ought to give them. Cer tain social, intellectual, and charitable de mands are made upon them that no one thinks of making upon the poor, and they are put to it to keep their heads above water in consequence. This is not true of Paris, it is certainly not true of Berlin, of Brussels, of Rome, or of Amsterdam, and I doubt if it be true of London. It is assuredly a curious com ment upon a democracy, that in its greatest city only the dwellers in the two extremes, 73 America and tke Americans tenements and palaces, live in comfortable financial security. This is a country of extremes and con trasts; no traveller, I fancy, would gainsay that. Everything that they take up here is exaggerated. In Paris one sees many women wearing no skirts at all when rid ing their bicycles. Here, in the upper part of New York, and in the parks, at Newport, Saratoga, and other places, one sees many women who wear skirts, but skirts of just that degree of shortness which makes their wearers more conspicuous than if they wore no skirts at all. It is the dif ference between the bare legs of an Ital ian fisherwoman, or a Swiss washerwoman, and the black - stockinged and gartered legs of the vaudeville stage, or the lubri cous poster. This whole matter is subjec tive, not objective. It is a question of the Tke seen imagination. It is not what is seen, but , what is suggested that plays havoc with decency. It may be the climate, which is highly ex citing, or this newly made wealth, or the de sire to surpass others, but whatever the cause, 74 Conflicting Evidence there is a tendency to carry to extremes such customs as they adopt. The ladies and gentlemen one sees at the various sum mer-resorts are very attractive to the eye, but the masculinity of the garments worn by the women, and the effeminacy of the costumes of some of the men, make the scene appear, somehow, not quite natural. It was rather as if a number of people were taking part in a play given out of doors. The men here are good sportsmen for all First-rate sportsmen, that. There are probably more good shots with rifle, shot - gun, and revolver within the boundaries of this republic than in any other country in the world. American horses have won at the best races in France and in England. At France and England s own game of court-tennis an American is facile princeps, and in track athletics and in yachting they have only lately given fresh proof of their superiority. The re cords for the high jump, and the broad jump, for hurdle racing, and the half mile, and mile flat race, and I believe all the records for skating and bicycle racing are held by Americans. They have no equals 75 America and the Americans at all these out-of-door sports,, unless it be the English, and even their equality is stoutly denied here. But even in their sports it seems to be less love of sport than love of personal distinc tion and display that actuates the majority. They play not for the mental and physical refreshment so much, as for the excitement of surpassing someone else. Time and time again have I remarked upon the fact that it is a rare thing to find, even in the country, people walking for the mere pleasure of gentle, unexciting exercise. All over France, Germany, and England you see people by the hundred, on any free day, walking in the country roads, lanes, and by-paths. Here, no such inconspicu ous, unexciting exercise is popular. There seems to be a certain feverishness of rivalry even in the way they take their exercise. sport at the One of the results of this is an endless ?v*. wr series of dissensions, quarrels, and discus sions, not among the professionals alone, but among the young gentlemen of the universities and the athletic clubs. In deed the game of foot-ball was played at Conflicting Evidence last, among these young gentleman, with so much bad temper, with so many personal encounters, and with such ceaseless accusa tions of cheating, foul play, and bad faith, against one another, that it was seriously proposed to stop the intercollegiate games altogether. All this is of course disgraceful, and for it there is no excuse whatever, unless it be that these so-called young gentlemen are not gentlemen at all. There seems to be a lack of the compara tive, and of the intermediate, of any sense of the value of the mean between extremes in everything. The newspapers banish the comparative, and use only superlatives. Men are either " rich " or " poor ; " speeches are " elo quent," and speakers are " orators ; " fire men and policemen are " heroes ; " shops have " splendid " or "magnificent" dis plays in their windows ; unknown country clergymen pay " touching tributes " to de ceased parishioners ; shopkeepers in pro vincial towns are " wealthy merchants ; " men of wealth who die almost always leave 77 America and the Americans "several millions" generally it is " ten millions; " actors and actresses and pub lic speakers "receive ovations;" Mrs. Jones, Mrs. Brown, and Mrs. Robinson receive their guests " attired in lovely crea tions," and "wearing the well-known" Jones, Brown, or Robinson "jewels;" lawyers make masterly pleas ; doctors receive "enormous fees;" the sale of a popular book " runs up into the tens of thousands;" of the newspapers that have " the largest circulation in the world " Smashing there is no end ; and the " smashing of rec ords " that goes on in this land of super latives in every department of life, es pecially in the Weather Bureau, which < smashes at least one record a day every day in the year, must keep the poor statisticians very busy. This is all of a kind, with the furi ous race for wealth, and the striving for victory at any price, which in the one case interferes with the quiet and com fort of domestic life, and in the other breeds constant discord in many of their athletic competitions. Success is not very 78 Conflicting Evidence closely scrutinized, but failure is given lit tle quarter. Though I have been treated everywhere, and by everybody, with courtesy, and often with prodigal hospitality, one phase of my character, I have often noticed, is looked upon with disapproval, and sometimes with something akin to contempt, and that is my contentment ! Why do I not speculate, Horror of why do I not invest in this or that ? No- me*t?" body can understand here that a man can really have enough ! There must be either a vein of duplicity, or a streak of insanity in a man of forty-five who is willing to live on his income, to serve on the various committees of his little country town, to look after the village school, to superintend the repairing of the roads, and to see to it that his farm-buildings are in order and his few tenants comfortable and happy. I am asked why I do not run for office, why p vzz i e dbj I do not start a newspaper, if I have bought shares in African gold mines, why I do not build tenement-houses, why, in short, I do not try to make myself famous or enor mously rich ! 79 America and the Americans Apparently it is scarcely reputable to be contented. I dare not reply that to be conspicuous politically, or to be prominent socially, or to be very rich, here, in this land of freedom, seems to me to be about the most awkward thing that can happen to a man, who has not the hide of a rhi noceros ; but if I did so reply, that would be my honest conclusions of the whole matter. The rich man in America carries the weight of all his wealth as a handicap in any political race. In any other country in the world it would help him, because the constituency to which he would appeal would consider that his wealth was a mark of success and a sign of ability. But let an Astor or a Vanderbilt or a Rockefeller Thehandi- or a Belmoiit run for office here, or let him cap iith. even be appointed to office by the Presi dent, and there is a chorus of envy, jeal ousy, and malicious criticism. They are all struggling for wealth, and they cer tainly toady to some extent to men who have great wealth, but, on the other hand, they seem to take a peculiar, and, to me, 80 weat Conflicting Evidence incomprehensible delight in preventing rich men from exercising their abilities in public and diplomatic office. In the case of one candidate for the presidency, a photograph of his rather large house in Washington was used throughout the West and South as a cam- Wealth and , i /~\ politics. paign document against him. One may say, with the approval of every astute politician in America, that the nomination and election of a millionnaire to the office of President of the United States would be absolutely impossible. To call a newspaper a rich men s newspaper, or a prominent railroad official a rich men s servant, or a great corporation lawyer a rich men s coun sel, is enough to discredit him in certain sections of the country. Ninety years ago the founder of the Astor fortune was a poor boy in the streets of New York ; fifty years ago the founder of the Gould fortune was an unknown sur veyor; twenty years ago the Vanderbilts were not known in New York society ; the Belmonts came to New York in the thirties, and the Standard Oil fortunes are all in the 81 America and the Americans possession of men whose fathers were un known in financial circles twenty-five years Unaccount- ago. Why then be jealous of men and a b l lsy. eal women whose money is new enough to suit the most stringent American test ? Would that I were able to answer my own ques tion ! This hot haste to get rich, and this fierce envy of those who are rich presents an ethical problem too subtle for solution by me. In France and Germany and England and Italy we can under- European stand the men who have no wish for great Afferent, wealth for themselves or for others, and who declaim against wealth as a wrong ; but it is difficult to understand men who cry out for more money, more silver, more paper, more anything that will buy things, and then turn upon those who have money to revile them ! They are infants in mat ters of economics, these good people ; nothing else can explain their attitude. 82 VII On Being Busy iNTIL one has been in this coun try some months, and has seen at close quarters the methods of the business and professional men, it is impossible to picture to one s self the almost fanatical use of all sorts of me chanical contrivances for the saving of labor, and, as I am inclined to believe, for the wasting of time. On the train going to Boston I noticed one gentleman who had with him a youth with a type-writing machine. During al- Tkeapotkt , , , , . osisofthe most the whole time we were in the tram t y p e - he was dashing off what appeared to be an enormous correspondence While I was not engaged in conversation with my two Boston friends, I watched his proceedings with interest. Some of the letters were very short, not more than a dozen lines, others were, no 83 America and the Americans doubt, much longer. The process was about as follows : A letter was taken up and read through by the gentleman. Then a sheet of paper was put into the machine, adjusted and re-adjusted, and the secretary pro ceeded to play on his keys, lifting the machine every now and then to look at what he had written, while the gentleman dictated. Twice his dictation was not to his satisfaction, the sheet in the machine was taken out, and a fresh one substituted, and the letter re-written. The letter once written, the secretary read it over, then the master read it over, usually made some corrections, and finally signed it. Then an envelope was put into the machine, an address printed on it, the envelope taken out, the letter picked up and put into the envelope, the envelope sealed, and the task for that letter was done. Time and The whole attention of two men \vas de- voted to the one letter, and the time con sumed, the machine-power used, and the expense of the labor required, were out of all proportion to what was accomplished. An accomplished secretary with such a 84 On Being Busy bundle of letters, and a few notes on each by his master, could have disposed of this correspondence in one-third to one-half the time, while occupying the time and at tention of one, instead of two, men. In every office of any importance one where finds a type-writer. They are used in writ- -writer is ing letters of every description, and often //. letters demanding, by all the laws of cour tesy, a reply in the hand of the master or his secretary. In many cases the manipu lator of the type-writing machine is also a shorthand writer. When this is the case, letters and communications of all kinds are dictated to the shorthand writer, who then retires and prints them off on his machine, brings them back to be read over and signed, and then puts them in their enve lopes, and addresses them. No one denies that in a great office there is a mass of matter that can be turned off quickly and properly by the use of these machines. But there is a mania for their use here, and it is considered "business like and suggestive of tremendous and rushing employment on the part of the 85 America and the Americans Stealing time* Haste and "waste. user to employ them on all occasions. The telephone, too, jingles its summons in every office and in every house, and the amusing side of it all is, that men most devoted to these devices for saving time, will waste time every day in ways that no busy Frenchman, German, or Englishman would permit for a moment. In offices furnished with all the labor- saving machines that this most ingenious people have devised, men come to sit down, and chat and smoke by the half- hour. Often the office-door opens to admit the intruder directly into the presence of this supposedly busy man. He cannot es cape, and his time is consumed by the half- hourful by friends and acquaintances who have nothing better to do. Men who rush off from a hasty break fast to board an express train, to be whirled to their telephone and type- writer, often employ a good proportion of time, when in the city, doing small errands, and in visiting, and being visited by other busi ness men, who have also rushed into the city at the rate of a mile a minute, carry- 86 On Being Busy ing an undigested breakfast in their stom achs, which they try vainly to soothe with a cigar consumed in a smoke - reeking smoking-car." It is considered symbolic of success to " have no time ! " While the very test of true success is, of course, to prove yourself master of time ; for if one is the slave of time, he is perforce the slave to the thou- sand-and-one devils that haste has in its train. I have done business in Paris, in Lon- Business don, and in New York, and to a small ex- metkods - tent in Berlin, but I refrain from giving my own opinion, though I may quote two Americans on this subject. One is a New York banker, the other a New York lawyer. The first told me that he could do more business in London, or in Berlin, in half an hour, than he could do in New York in two hours; and the other, the lawyer, said the same of London, with the differ ence that he made the ratio a half-hour to one hour. Letters, the lawyer said, were answered more promptly, engagements were kept more punctually, and busy men 37 America and the Americans refused absolutely to have their fixed hours for work disturbed or interfered with. The Americans have far more mechanical devices, and make more use of them, than any other people, but these cannot com pensate for the lack of trained, and faith ful, personal service. I may not mention the name of my distinguished friend, a French banker in Paris, but the political, social, and strictly professional work that, with the aid of two secretaries, he turns off every day between the hours of ten and three just five hours it would require a dozen telephones, and as many type-writers, merely to enumerate. No Frenchman, and no Englishman, holding public office, no matter how important, would fail to A question answer a civil note promptly, and by the of civility. hand O f a secretar y ; here, on the contrary, one receives notes and letters, even of a personal nature, dictated to a type-writer. No amount of machinery can atone for a lack of method, and for the systematiza- tion of the business side of life, by impera tive and unbreakable rules. Here, there 88 On Being Busy is a good deal of work of all kinds done at hap-hazard, and the consequent waste of time is enormous. The critics of all this will not remember how new is everything. I keep forgetting it myself. Fifty years ago Harvard Uni- Fifty years versity had only two hundred students; as schooling, even of an elementary kind, was difficult to get ; libraries and books were scarce ; a German and seventy-five years ago a Greek text-book was a rarity ; edu cated and cultivated men were few, and even now a trained mind is not essential to political success, or even to the holding of the highest political offices, hence even now the demand for such is comparatively small. How can one expect then an army of experienced clerks, hundreds of competent private secretaries, thousands of well-trained servants of every description ? It is lack of Waste, of these that makes a methodical life difficult, encrgy and which interferes at every step with a man s getting the very best out of him self, at the smallest cost to himself of worry and waste. America and the Americans Then, too, besides the scarcity of the higher grades of labor, there is a very general disinclination on the part of even those who can afford it, to pay others for doing what, by any possibility, they can do for themselves. Hence hundreds of men are wasting time and strength, and decreasing their own ability to do their best, by in sisting upon expending themselves in doing what others could do as well for them. In England and I may be pardoned if I am prejudiced in my remarks on the sub ject of America s great-grandmother English there is a pretentious affectation of idleness. To hear many young men talk in England, one would imagine that they never did any work, that none of their ancestors had ever done any, and that none of their friends had any to do. The height of "bad form" is to refer to, or to talk, "shop." This I deem a ridiculous af fectation on the part of any class, in a na tion of shopkeepers. In America there is, however, an equally American ridiculous affectation of appearing to be affectation. , T . , .. .. . busy. In England polite snobbery dic- 90 On Being Busy tates the question : " How are you amusing yourself?" In America polite snobbery dictates the question : " What are you do ing?" Everybody is, out of politeness, supposed to be over head and ears busy. Busy in trade, busy in his profession, busy socially ! You are continually hearing both men and women say : " I really must give up some of my engagements ; I have no time for anything ! " All this is the more ridiculous when one comes to see how very restricted is the variety of social distrac tion, even in New York while outside of New York and Washington, the social functions in other cities are not only of a restricted but of a somewhat provincial kind. But it is the fashion to be busy, to be Pretence oj , , , . . , business, overwhelmed with engagements, to be pressed for time, to be driven to death, in short, by one s terrible social, professional, or business responsibilities. In some cases it is true, but true because the sufferers are incompetent to control their own affairs ; but in the great majority of instances it is a huge joke or a seriously assumed affectation. America and the Americans Lack of recreation. A patho- logical wager. This hypocrisy, however, brings many evils in its wake. So many people object to being suspected of having any time on their hands, that they will not take recre ation openly, even when they can do so as well as not. A friend here tells me that his physician, who is a recognized authority in the med ical world and the author of one or two books, tells him that the great cities of America are the paradise of nervous dis eases, and that the use of sedatives is far more prevalent here than in any other country in the world. I have no statistics, and the observation I am about to make may have no warning significance, but one day an acquaintance here, who knew that I was interested in American peculiarities, offered to bet me five dollars each day, for two weeks, that each morning there would be an account of a suicide in the newspapers, and twenty- five dollars that at the end of the two weeks there would have been not less than ten suicides noted. I declined the first bet, but took the second; and lost, for there 92 On Being Busy were in those fourteen days eleven suicides. This may mean much, or it may mean little, as being merely a coincidence, but it is a fact that I have deemed worthy of jotting down, as it came under my own personal observation, and is not a tale invented for the delectation of the unwary traveller. One prime reason why Americans are considered by Europeans to be under-cul tivated, is their very general inability to hold any sort of intercourse by correspond- American ence without making blunders social 2*/x. * blunders, and blunders arising from lack of training and education. The most commonplace shades and gradations of dif ference in one s correspondence with people who occupy different relations to us seem to be totally unfamiliar to many Americans, whose wealth and position would imply in any other country just such knowledge. In Rome, London, and Berlin, more Contincn- . rr i r r i tal gossip. than one unofficial note, from one of the under-secretaries at the American Embas sies of these cities, has been passed about as a sample of American ignorance and American bad manners. 93 America and the Americans After my visit to Harvard College I Letter received a note about some trifling matter vard. from one of the students there, who is in the highest class, whose education indeed was supposed in a month or two to be fin ished. In it two words were misspelled, the punctuation was done evidently by accident, and the phrases and the forms of address and closing were such as a French boy ten years old might well have been ashamed of. On the other hand, I have a large bundle of the most charming and witty notes and letters from Americans. What I am re marking upon is merely that the great mass of people in some sort of society in Amer ica do not know how to write either notes or letters, and that many men and women holding prominent positions and possessing large wealth, write you notes and letters unworthy of a first-rate head-gardener or a country shopkeeper. The type- This, I think, is partly the secret of the popularity. American love of the type-writer, the tele phone, and the telegraph. It not only saves time, as they think at least, but it 94 On Being Busy also saves an exposure of their own igno rance. It is a fallacy repeated in each genera tion, and believed by the superficial of each generation, that personal service will be Personal more and more supplanted by mechanical chanical service ; that the steam-locomotive engine will do away with horses and men ; that the factory will do away with the hands ; that the reaper will banish the laborers ; that the type-writer and telephone will banish the pen, and so on. But these in ventions come, are welcomed, are used, and still there is a subtle quality in human nature that prevents the banishment of men by machines. The Americans are a new people, and they like new things, having no prejudice Love of of tradition against them, and they, more easily than other nations, become the vic tims of this fallacy. The English, dull as they are, have seen the futility of this theory ; so, too, have the French, and to an even greater degree have the Germans, while the Japanese are learn ing it, as they learn everything, with the 95 America and the Americans instinctive mental quickness of their race. Methods of Little England, little Germany, little Japan, commer cial rivals, train their men rather than their machines, and the commerce of the world, when ana lyzed, shows the results in spite of the tre mendous advantages that this fabulously wealthy in natural resources country has. I prophesy that twenty-five years from this time, machinery will not be used so indiscriminately to take the place of men in this country, and -that far more men and women will know how to write their own letters than is now the case. This is pre-eminently the land of free schools, free education, and free opportu nity, but there is a subtle association of ideas needed to give refinement. There are generations of men and wom en in Italy, France, Austria, and England, who carry on, and bequeath to others, the intangible laws of good manners. This is lacking here. On the other hand, there is no lack of willingness to learn or to imitate good models. But the area is so great, prece- On Being Busy dents are so few, genuine superiority so Lack of loath to assert itself, and regarded with such jealousy, even when it is recognized, that people are much at sea for teachers and examples in matters of manners. Hence the stranger is often surprised to find an eminent lawyer, a secretary of legation, a clergyman, a member of the cabinet these being instances that have come under my personal notice apparently unable to write a note accepting an invitation to din ner, and ignorant of the proper way to ad dress, and to phrase, a letter to one with whom they are only slightly acquainted. At first one puts it down to boorishness, but the genial reception later, and the hearty good-will of the man, when you meet him, prove conclusively enough that it is merely ignorance of the finer shadings of social intercourse, and nothing worse than that. The constant and almost universal use of the telephone, the telegraph, and the type-writer, accustom people less and less to the more ceremonious forms of inter course. The drops of the " oil of glad- 97 America and the Americans ness " which soften and make smooth the The refine- interchange of formalities between man tnents of , , , , , , social inter- and man, when the pen is ready and the amenities of social life part of one s very being, are not to be found here. They have no time so they say ! They work so hard so they affirm ! Competition is so bitter, " we must hustle," " we must hurry up ; " capital phrase that, "hurry up ! " and so on with the excuses. Perhaps these statements are true. Who knows ! Cer tainly, I do not, but my grandmother was wont to tell me, alas ! all too many years ago, that "gut s excuse, s accuse /" VIII American Politics URING my stay in New York I met a number of politicians. One in particular I remember. A man a few years younger than myself, who has already played a prominent part, and who was running over his enemies say, " slopping over with opinions and knowledge of political mat ters, both new and old. Later, on my jour ney to Boston, I was introduced on the very steps of the train to two Boston men, both of them holding office, the one in Wash- A sojour* , , . , . ,-, , in Wash ington, the other in his own State, and ington. during our five hours journey together they told me much that was of interest. I must confess, too, that not long ago I was in Washington in a semi-official capac ity, for a few weeks, and much that I saw and heard there makes part of my present impressions. 99 America and the Americans In reading the newspapers more de tailed notes of which I have collected in the latter part of my journal one notices first of all the out-spoken lawlessness of pretty much everything that deals with political controversy. One would imagine that no single man in political life is either trusted or respected. This method of deal ing with one s political opponents is, I found, nothing new. A century ago, shortly after Jay s treaty Pcrsonaii- with England was signed, Washington, ago. ns whose name is now received everywhere with something little short of reverence, was dealt with in much the same, or even in worse, fashion. He was called a "thief," "the American Csesar," "the step-father of his country," accused of having committed murder, and said to "have the ostentation of an Eastern pa- shaw." Thomas Paine wrote of him : The first " As for you, sir, treacherous in private presidents, f r i en( 3 s hip, an d a hypocrite in public life, the world will be puzzled to decide wheth er you are an apostate or an impostor." After his retirement from office another American Politics wrote : " Now will political iniquity cease to be legalized by a name." Thomas Jefferson was called a "cow ard " and a "runaway," and his turn for philosophizing was ridiculed when he was pictured if he should be elected President as surprised by a foreign minister while "in the act of anatomizing the kidneys and glands of an African, to find out why the negro is black and odoriferous." Adams was called an "aristocrat," "a Political , , , , , amenities monocrat, "an anglomamac ; was ac- at the birth cused of having taken a bribe from the ^ h British for his celebrated defence of the British soldiers after the so-called Boston massacre, and was said to be desirous of establishing a monarchy with his sons to succeed him. Such was the treatment of the first three presidents of the United States. But they were not alone. No one escaped. Jay was burned in effigy. Franklin was called a " rake," and twitted with being the fa ther of illegitimate children, and also with having bequeathed a lot of bad debts to a hospital for a legacy. Hamilton was ac- 101 America and the Americans cused of almost as many unmentionable crimes as was Napoleon, while Gerry, Marshall, Gallatin, Monroe, Madison, and far too many more to enumerate, suffered intolerable indignities of verbal insult. This was then called, and still goes by the name of, the freedom of the press. In defence of this privilege to insult and to The news- injure your enemy, it is said that thereby th e e nse? rascality is exposed, and all underhand dealings made impossible. As a matter of fact, however, the result has been to leave few newspapers in the United States with much power for good, or with much ability to do harm. All their partisan ti rades, all their insulting superlatives, all their libellous accusations are read indiffer ently, and considered merely part of the political game. The newspapers are not bribed, at least not directly, I believe, but most of them have sold their power for either good or evil, by an unrestrained abuse of their privileges. Even in Massachusetts, Garrison, Phil lips, Webster, and Sumner were all of them insulted and humiliated in their own State 102 American Politics and by their own constituents. I presume that there are some bad men in American politics, and no doubt they deserve casti- gation at the hands of the newspapers ; but surely it is a pity that the intelligent foreigner should be led to believe, by the is ever general tone of the public press in this Ve country, that every politician is a rascal. This state of things is due, first, to the intense and widespread envy of success which is noticeable here in all departments of life; and second, to the fact that un doubtedly an ever larger number of men, particularly in the State and federal senates, procure their elections, or are supposed to procure their elections, by the direct use of, or the indirect influence of, their money, or that of their friends. At any rate, it is certainly true that the per centage of rich men in the United States Senate to-day is out of all proportion to the wealth of their constituents. The federal senators are elected not directly by the people, but indirectly by the State legislatures. The State legislat ures are a smaller, and more easily influ- 103 America and the Americans enced, body than the whole body of electors, and hence, if there be bribery and corruption, it is more conveniently brought to bear at that point. I expressed some surprise to my fellow- passengers on the journey to Boston, that the constituencies themselves do not pre fer to be represented politically by their best men. " Sometimes they do," was The better the reply, but often the best men refuse to serve. They do not fear abuse and criti cism for themselves, but few men can bear to have their wives, and even their chil dren and their servants, surreptitiously photographed and interviewed, and, not infrequently, maligned and insulted. When a man stops to think that his whole family history as far back as it can be traced, that his personal griefs, that his most private domestic relations, that his business and professional concerns, that his intimate friends, will all be made the theme of jest, satire, and caricature, he hesitates before offering himself and all these for such a sacrifice. Another feature of American politics 104 American Politics which the Americans themselves, with their usual indifferent good-humor, do not recog- Sectional nize, is the rapidly increasing differences between the geographical sections of their enormous territory. In days gone by, the principal rivalry was between Massachusetts and Virginia, representing respectively Northern and Southern feeling. Now the rivalry is be tween the great agricultural States of the middle West and the great manufacturing States of the Northeast ; between the silver- producing States of the West and the gold- possessing States of the East ; between the States where wealth and comfort and culture are defending their own stability and demanding a solid foundation of con servative finance, and the States, like Texas in the Southwest, and the farming communities in the middle and Northwest ern States, where there is little money, and where the population, with little to lose and everything to gain, takes up with the most visionary theories of misunderstood social ism and unsound finance. It is to be remembered in this connection America and the Americans that each of these States, no matter how great or how small the population, how rich or how poor in natural or acquired wealth ; no matter whether its population is native American, or composed of a majority of negroes, or of lately settled immigrants ; no matter whether educated or illiterate, is represented in the federal Senate by two members, no less and no A curiosity more. And, according to the Constitution, stitutio no one of the States can be deprived of equal representation in the Senate with all the others. This is making unequal things equal with a vengeance. As an instance of what might happen, there are ten States whose total population is less than that of New York City and its environments alone, and whose total wealth is also much less than that of New York City ; and yet they are represented in the United States Senate by twenty votes, while the whole of New York State, which includes New York City, has only two Theconsc- votes. In short, almost one-fourth of the voting power in the United States Senate is in the hands of men who represent a 106 American Politics population smaller than that of New York City. This is already a source of incon venience, and might well become, I should think, the cause of grievances that could only be settled after a serious disturbance of the machinery of government. Aside from the spasmodic enthusiasm aroused at intervals by the State and federal elections, there seems to be little interest taken in politics by many Americans. In England you are bored to death in American every smoking-room, at every dinner, and ^cifaHn- at every club, by the political talk, and in France there is a very lively interest, on the part of almost everybody, in politics, while every Italian nowadays is a politi cian. Here, I am told, in the large cities, it is almost impossible to get the very class of men to vote who have most at stake in the continuance of good government. Oc casionally there is an outburst of indigna tion on the part of the better classes, and there follows an overturn, but matters soon quiet down again, and the mice come back to play in the public granary. 107 America and the Americans One never hears of the debauchery of politics in the United States without hear ing at the same time many allusions to the The irhh Irish, and the solid Irish vote. It may be my ignorance and my inexperience, but having seen something of the Irish politi cian in his native lair, New York, I am bound to confess that I found him an agreeable fellow. The native, half-humorous, indulgence of success, no matter what its origin, is ap plied to these politicians. If a man have money, and ability to use its power, great latitude is given to him in matters of per sonal morality. Sometimes even the eccle siastical world is suspected of overlooking faults in large contributors, that are con demned mercilessly in the incompetent. The mass of the people get the notion that there is an element of "buncombe" in ethics, as in politics. They are bewildered, it may be, by the example of this or the other rich man of notorious evil life, high in the councils of the church, or in society. The keen desire for, and admiration of, success, and a rather arbitrary ethical code, 108 American Politics combine to make political chicanery easy, and organized opposition to it enormously difficult. Then, too, these politicians have qualities dear to the American heart : they are affable, vulgar, charitable toward the vices of others, and without assumption of virtue themselves. The record of the Irish during the last war was unsurpassed by that of any of the other foreign nationalities who took part in it. Two Irish lads, it was, who printed and pub lished the first edition of Shakespeare pub lished in this country, and the ancestors of two of the presidents of the United States came from the same village in the north of Ireland. Pretty much every other political party in this country has been split up and dis integrated by internal dissensions at one time or another, but nobody has ever suc ceeded in breaking the solid columns of the Irish Democrats, They hate England, but The solid it would be strange if they did not, and that sometimes interferes with the amicable relations that ought to exist between the two countries ; but, to be frank, that is be- 109 America and the Americans cause the American politicians are syco phants to the Irish vote, and not through any fault of the Irish and say what one will, their constant and unwavering loyalty to their own party, and their own people, is rather admirable than otherwise. The Americans are in a large majority everywhere, and if they choose to be ruled, Whose robbed, and misgoverned as they claim to be by a minority of Irish voters, one can hardly bestow much sympathy upon them. It has been said that " Ce sont les mino- rites qui gouvernent le monde, ct c* est pour cela que le monde a une histoire ; si la vraie majorite gouvernait, il ne se passer ait jamais rien.^ Certainly there is no lack of excit ing political happenings under the rule of The irhh this Hibernian minority here, though they C tionto U ~ cause little rejoicing among the tax-pay - * ing sufferers. The making of notable history must be like the American habit of broiling live lobsters more agreeable to him who enjoys it afterwards than to him who undergoes the operation at the time. no American Politics To the traveller who comes here to look on and to note impressions, this bullying of the natives by the vivacious Celts from the Emerald Isle is only another example of the national good-humor and indifference. "Let me make my pile, and you may do what you like with the municipal and the federal government!" seems to be the general sentiment. If the natives can make thousands, they will not bother to punish those who steal hundreds. Call it indiffer ence, good-humor, recklessness, what you will, it is their own doing. They have no right to complain. They deserve to be is this in robbed and bullied and made uncomfort- dtm able. Perhaps some day they will arouse themselves from their scramble for wealth, and begin to think of governing themselves. Nowadays, this is merely an autocracy of those who will do the dirty machine-work, not a republic. in IX A Visit to Boston [HEN I made it known to my New York friends that I was soon to visit Boston, the ad vice, suggestions, and com ments that I received were very amusing. I was told that as soon as the train crossed Phiihtine the line into New England, I should hear *ooilf very little English, as almost everybody spoke Latin or Greek; the theatres pre sented only Greek plays, and nowadays Ibsen s comedies ; no smoking and no swearing were permitted in the streets ; the ladies wore blue veils and eye-glasses ; the men spoke English of the most British de scription, and wore their sheepskin de grees from Harvard College instead of shirt-fronts ; little boys might be seen go ing through the streets in procession, to present petitions to the Governor that school hours might be lengthened ; at the 112 A Visit to Boston principal clubs there were debates, three evenings in the week, on metaphysical subjects ; several of the churches had wom en pastors, who wore bloomers in the pulpit; at evening parties, after the dis cussion of a paper read by a Harvard pro fessor, Apollinaris and iced - cream were served, and at very swell houses, " club soda;" New York people only visited Boston when in deep mourning, since no entertainment there made such habiliments seem out of place. I was warned to express no surprise at the colossal procreative energies of the passengers on the Mayflower when the The May- i - flowers stupendous number of their descendants fecundity. was made known to me; and I was ad vised, that if I wished to be popular in Boston, nothing could serve my purpose better than to mistake Bunker Hill Monu ment for a monolith, and to sigh over the social frivolity and the intellectual bar renness of New York. I believe it to be true, that when any Truth and large number of people in any part of the humor world acquire a reputation for eccentric- America and the Americans ity, even though humor has exaggerated that reputation, there is likely to be truth in the characterization. At a dinner in New York I had met a wealthy Bostonian and his wife. The day after my arrival in Boston I called upon them, as they had requested, and that same evening I was transferred, bag and baggage, to their very handsome residence. This was on a Thursday, and I am to be their guest until Monday. Now it may have been a coincidence at the time I know that I was inclined to suspect that it was a hoax, suggested to my hostess by my friends in New York but on Saturday morning I was invited by my hostess to go with her to attend a reading The from Browning. Until we were actually in the hal ^ and the reading had begun, j still cherished the hope that it was all a joke. But it was no joke. For an hour and a half a young gentleman, very prettily dressed, and wearing a conspicuous num ber of finger-rings, read selections from Browning to us. After the reading I was presented to a few of the ladies, and in a 114 - - : : : : - ":" : - : - : - ...: - -.- : " : : America and the Americans I beg off. Boston s weekly so cial re hearsal. On two other occasions during my short stay I was invited to attend, once an evening lecture, and once another reading, this time from Thucydides, by a young college professor; but as I excused my self on the plea of insufficient acquaintance with the English language to appreciate these forms of entertainment, I have no means of judging of their quality or in terest. On Friday afternoon, however, I at tended a concert, or a " rehearsal," I be lieve it was called, where again the au dience was almost wholly composed of women. This, I was told, was a Boston in stitution a sort of musical afternoon-tea, where every Friday during the winter months, Boston inspects Boston through its eye-glasses, and, at the same time, makes attestation to itself of its love of culture manifesting itself in musical guise. Let us before all things be fair, and add, that though such a matter may lend itself to the exaggerations of humor on the part of the New York barbarians outside of the mod ern Athens, it is undoubtedly the most care 116 A Visit to Boston fully planned, and best, musical treat to be had in America. Boston rather prides itself on some of its peculiarities while others laugh, and with some show of reason. From the days of the Illuminati, of one hundred years ago, to the Ibsenism and neo-Buddhism of to-day, Boston has been the prey of all sorts of mental frenzies. Some of This is the home of the Transcendental! sts fads. in philosophy, of the Deists in theology, of the " Mugwumps" in politics, of Fourier- ism in sociology. It was not far from here that the " Brook Farm Movement " attempted to put into practice the theories of our French social ists of half a century ago. Here manual Socialism labor was to be leavened by the intellectual nptcy. life, and everything in common resulted in nothing in particular, except debts. The abolition movement did not begin here, though it was here that a mob of respectable gentlemen led William Lloyd Garrison about the streets with a rope around his waist ; here, also, that the aris tocratic part of the community ridiculed Governor Andrew for drilling and pre- 117 America and the Americans paring the State militia in anticipation of the War of the Rebellion. Boston also has the honor, a doubtful one, of having been the only community to insult Washington through the person of its chief magistrate, when Washington journeyed through the country after his election as President. Though this part of the world has some Literary serious defects of its qualities, it is fair to say that its qualities, some of them, are of a very distinguished kind. The little knot of men who brought American literature into prominence were New England men Longfellow, Lowell, Emerson, Whittier, Hawthorne, Thoreau, Holmes, Poe, and others of less note, were all native New Englanders, and all practically contem poraries. It would be difficult to match such a literary crop in one season, as that, anywhere else in the world. Boston s The Revolution would have been im possible, and the Rebellion next to im possible, without New England s aid. It is well for the rest of America to remember these things, but it would be perhaps more 118 re minis* ccnccs. A Visit to Boston dignified of New Englanders not to do so much in the way of reminding others of their importance in the past. The decayed gentlewoman who is con- tinually recalling to us her past, produces the effect upon -her less sympathetic lis teners of making them to wish that decay were more rapid. New York, Chicago, St. Louis, and Kansas City are of this class of listeners when Boston begins to give the details of her former services. After a fortnight of Boston, Cambridge, Concord, and Plym outh, one begins to understand the un sympathetic, not to say weary, attitude of Boston s neighbors of less famous pedigree. Though the learning and culture are not so general, nor so conspicuous to the man in the street, as I was led to expect, there is no joke about the air of chastened su periority which pervades the people. It is based on little enough now, for literature has flown to New York, and commerce has followed close after, while enterprise has gone West, and the political centre of grav ity has moved elsewhere. 119 America and the Americans Boston reached a certain level, socially and intellectually, before any of her rivals, Social pro- but she seems to have stayed there ; hence to _ day ^ Q foreigner is confronted with the population of a city, in the social and lit erary short jacket and knickerbockers of a country town. The leaders of thought and action and fashion are no longer to be met with in Boston. The great houses socially are conducted by in the three or four principal cases men and women who are as grand fatherless as their friends in New York. The entertainments of the more ambitious social set lack brilliancy, because there is a dearth of variety in the guests. Poor Mr. McAllister s famous " Four Hundred is cut down to fourscore here, and as the very essence of society is to be exclusive, exclusiveness here necessarily re sults in entertainments of the ghastly char acter of church sociables, only with more gilding. I attended four dinners, at which the i- smallest number of guests was twelve, the largest twenty-six or twenty-eight. At all four were my host and hostess ; and at all 120 A Visit to Boston four was one man, and at three two men, who seemed to be invited to every dinner in Boston. Not that it was not agreeable to meet these same people everywhere, but in what other capital which assumes such impor tance is there such a dearth of social va riety? You really began to feel as though intimacies. you lived in the same house with these peo ple, and to understand how it is that so many people in Boston call one another by their petits noms. The constant reference to "Mrs. Jim," "Mrs. Billy," "Mrs. Dick;" and to "Bob," "Nat," "Tom," and "Jim," which at first seemed an af fectation, ceased to be that, and I under stood that it was the natural outcome of the charming familiarity of a country town. The conversation, too, was, much of the time, a conversation a clef, so far as I was concerned. The petits noms corresponded to the petites affaires, which interested them, and made up the stock pieces of their talk. They had all travelled, they all go frequently to New York, and when the conversation was directed to me, personally, 121 America and the Americans there was some effort at orientation, but when they talked to one another, it was al ways in the pleasant and familiar jargon, and with the understood allusions, of a party of peasants at a picnic. Nor is this circumscribed and monoto- Doubtfui nous social life a characteristic noticed by *fk?kome ^ foreigners alone. When I met people at Cambridge, and elsewhere, who were not frequenters of this small circle, I found that even their own neighbors realized that Bos ton lost, rather than gained, by the pro vincialism of its chief entertainers. But this may have been jealousy on their part ; one can never be sure as to that, unless one lives for years in a community. My short visits to America enable me merely to be a chronicler of what I saw and heard, and not a critic of the Boston ians or of any other people of whom I write. It is not to be denied, however, that there A longitu- seems to be more heart-burning, morestriv- ing and pushing, more juggling for social opportunity, here than elsewhere. One long and beautiful avenue is, from all accounts, a longitudinal cemetery of buried social 122 A Vhit to Boston hopes, with fine residences standing as oc cupied monuments. Here have flocked the families who, having made money, expected that by taking up their abodes along this avenue they would be that much nearer the social citadel ; but, alas ! for them, they stormed successfully this first line of breast works only to find their progress indefi nitely delayed there. Pelts and pellets, whiskey and patent medicines, pork and beef, reapers and oil- wells, may land those who benefit largely enough from them in the inner social circle at New York or Chicago, but not so here so it is claimed, at least. In New York and Washington one hears certain residential districts spoken of as unfashionable, but it is done in a joking way, and in their social life there, though not to the same extent as in European cap itals, one meets the men and women who People i did have made their mark in art, literature, fi nance, the Church, the State, or at the bar. But, in Boston, society is markedly lacking in this salt of variety. I was astonished to find that of the half 123 America and the Americans a dozen men in and about Boston whom I, a foreigner, had heard of and wanted to meet, not one was to be met with at such houses as I visited. Even the social stand by, of whom at least one specimen is always present at a French or English or Italian, and often at a New York, dinner-table, the clergyman, was absent. The names of the President of Harvard College and of two of its professors, of one clergyman, one banker, and one railway magnate, in Boston, were familiar to me. Social life But I was told that none of these appeared " society* in Boston society. The president, profess- ors, and the clergyman because they did not care to do so, and the banker and the railway magnate because, for some occult reason, they were not asked. And yet if these six men were taken out of Boston, it would be with difficulty that they could be replaced. I met them all six during my visit, but it was because I went to them, and not because they appeared in the society to which I was introduced from Paris and New York. My host knew them all, but 124 A Visit to Boston though I mentioned several times my pur pose to see them, it was very apparent that they, and their wives, were not convenient to entertain. He met them in one capac ity or another, some of them frequently, but he and his wife did not meet them and their wives. This all seemed to me very stupid, but I suppose that is because I am stupid, for "stupid" is the last word that a Bostonian ever applies to himself or to the institutions he upholds. 125 X Class Distinctions I HEN one visits a community which claims to have given particular attention to the rocking of the cradle of Lib erty, one expects to find in that commun ity signs of the vigor of the child Liberty at the advanced age of one hundred years. It is startling to find then, that, of all places, the churches are the very citadels of class distinctions. After I had attended to my own devo tions early in the morning, I was taken Boston at to one of the oldest churches in Boston. Here the pews are all owned, actually owned, by the worshippers, who can dis pose of them to their heirs like any other property. As this congregation assembled, the different families marched in procession to their seats or pews, as they are called 126 Class Distinctions here walked in, and shut and locked the doors behind them. This is the hi^h-water mark of exclusive- . cal excln- ness, so far as my experience of the world goes. No club, no theatre, no society, no office, is more completely in the hands of its possessors. You can be elected even to the French Academy if you merit it ; even the President of the United States must open his official residence to the people from time to time, and shake hands with whosoever comes, but in these houses of God in Boston, membership may con tinue a family affair, like the throne of England or Russia. When this aristocratic ecclesiastical arrangement was explained to me, my astonishment was unbounded, but none of my informants seemed to share my astonishment. The vulgarity and the blasphemous com mercial aspect of the whole thing seemed not to appear to them. Why there should not be "job -lots," "bargains," " booms," and " corners " in the matter of "salvation," as in other affairs, they evi dently do not understand. At the large 127 America and the Americans church I attended in the afternoon, the pews were, I was told, rented in much the same fashion, though there were no little doors to lock, as in the first church I at tended. The clergymen who preside over these institutions are paid a regular salary, and dismissed at the option of the pew-owners strange po- and pew-renters. They have, of course, no sit ion of the i r j L\ i_ i clergy. more actual freedom than a butler or a coachman. If they do not preach what is wanted, or if they do not conduct them selves, socially and politically, to the taste of their masters, they can be summarily dismissed at a few months notice. I asked how it was that priests who as sume the power to pronounce absolution and forgiveness are at the same time prac tically without power even to retain their The shcp- places, or to pronounce their flock right or wrong, since the sheep have only to get to gether and vote to eject the shepherd from the fold when it pleases them so to do. It was admitted that this was apparently a strange anomaly, but that, as a matter of fact, there is seldom any difficulty in re- 128 Class Distinctions placing a shepherd. On the contrary, many shepherds apply for every vacant fold, and often there are regular political caucuses, and much manoeuvring by the friends of this shepherd, or that, to get him elected. Shepherds of other folds, smaller or less lucrative, often write, and ask to be allowed to present themselves for the suffrage of a larger or wealthier fold which is known to be vacant. So universal is this club -like manage ment and exclusiveness of the churches, that the audiences you see in them are as fashionably dressed as the audience at a first-rate theatre. No poor people ever man at think of attending them, any more than church, they think of entering a fashionable club. Often these wealthy ecclesiastical clubs have "chapels" or "missions" in other parts of the city, to which the poor are supposed to go, but to which, as a rule, the self-respecting poor and rightly so will not go. Those who do go are the syco phants, who go in order to fawn upon, and get money and clothes and fuel from, the representatives of the rich families who 129 America and the Americans go there to teach, or to assist at the ser vices. Said my clerical friend to me: "Those chapels and missions of the rich city churches are hot-beds of hypocrisy, jeal ousy, and sycophancy. I would not go to one if I were a poor man, and I have little respect for the poor man who does." " Where do the poor go, and who looks after them, then?" I inquired. "Your clerical people and the Salvation Army look after comment. them sp i r i tua H Vj go f ar ^ it ig done at ajl _ and it is to be remembered in this con nection that fifty-six per cent, of the total white population of America is not iden tified with any church, and that thirty- six per cent, of these belong to the poorer class and we Protestants contribute large ly toward their material support. Why, The many of these churches," he continued, C and C socLi "are just as easily defined socially as the pr es t,ge. c \ u ^ This set of people go to one, that set go to another, and so on ; and people get into them, and go to them, very often for the chance of the social recognition that may follow from such attendance." 130 Class Distinctions With all that, I, as a foreigner, have nothing to do. It is another of the many problems that the Americans have to solve for themselves. The subject interests me only as another phase of the unrepublican Pas mon state of affairs here. It interests me also, as showing how here again the theory re sults in the most deplorable practice, and yet the people themselves, with their cus tomary good-humored indifference, pass it by and neglect it. Advertisements of summer villas, of yachts, and of second-hand carriages ap pear side by side with the advertisements of "centrally located" pews to rent in this- or that fashionable church. One man was pointed out to me, in Boston, who sub-let pews in three different churches, and made Bulls and " a good thing out of all of them," as my c**rv*. friend expressed it. One can fancy it to be quite in keeping with the American genius for trading, to pick up a job-lot of pews in a church, then to "boom" the church, and sub-let the pews at an advance. I am not aware that there are actually brokers who devote themselves exclusively America and the Americans to this business, but there is no reason on the face of things as here conducted why there should not be. At any rate, you often hear clergymen spoken of as having stnck-mar- " great drawing power," meaning that they a^nilifster. attract large audiences, who buy or rent pews, and thus keep the church exchequer full. Twice in the newspapers I have seen notices of the dismissal of clergymen be cause they could not " fill" their churches, and thus meet expenses. When I think of the two priests in my own parish, and of the pittance that they receive, and of the small " drawing power " My "Man- they possess, and yet of the boundless good Curt.* e they do, and the endless services they ren der our small community, I wonder how long either one of them would consent to remain in a parish where his services were measured by the receipts at the door, as though he were a leading performer in a theatrical troupe. This system must be galling to the devoted clergy, as it certainly is productive of the most cynical worldli- ness in those who are callous or indifferent. Here again the good-humored laisser- 132 Class Distinctions aller policy of the Americans reveals itself. The clerical mountebanks are ridiculed, clerical sneered at, and, in some quarters, openly banks! despised, and yet crowds go to hear them and to laugh at their jokes ; they go to pray, and remain to scoff. They are ap plauded but not trusted, as in the case of some of the American publicists. In fact, if a man is widely popular in America, if he be much applauded, and have many followers and many listeners, you may set him down, in two out of four cases, as be ing a man whom the people secretly dis trust. This is a peculiar state of affairs, but it is borne out by the fact that it is becoming more and more difficult to nominate for election to the presidency of the United The case oj States a really first-class man. Since the %&?* first six presidents, with the one very nota ble exception of Abraham Lincoln and even in his case he was not known to the people when they elected him there has not been elected to the office of chief mag istrate a single individual of first-rate pow ers, while some who have filled the office 133 America and the Americans have been, as in the case of Taylor, Bu chanan, Pierce, Polk, Hayes, and the first Harrison, men of very second-rate abilities indeed. Some of these presidents after election however have proved themselves to be unexpectedly capable. Another very palpable reason for the growing divergence of classes in this coun try is the rapidly growing popularity of Public and the private, as distinct from the public, private 11* i i r sckoois. schools. A century, or even halt a century, ago the boys of any community, rich and poor alike, went to school and to college together, and knew one another intimately all through their boyhood and youth. There was less jealousy and less suspic ion between classes then, because the boys were educated together, and also because Growing there were not then, as now, such vast dif- ^ttveenrich ferences of wealth between the rich and poor. t ^ e poor. All the people lived more nearly on the same level. In the days of Washington, the two Adamses, and Jeffer son, the youths of the land were educated along the same lines, and in the same schools. 134 Class Distinctions To-day all that is changed. The public schools in the large cities are attended by the children of the poor almost exclusively, while the children of the well-to-do are sent to private schools some of them on Tkeprtvate the plan of the great English public schools where the fees and expenses for one boy s schooling for a year range from 2,500 to 5,000 francs. These schools are quite out of reach of even people with moderate incomes. This is a severe blow at the theory of popular education, and strikes also at the very heart of the republican theory, that all should profit by the same educational opportuni ties. Instead of this, there is rapidly grow ing an aristocracy of education. This aris tocracy of the private schools distrusts the democracy of the public schools, and the democracy of the public schools is suspi cious, and often jealous, of the aristocracy of the private schools. They do not meet, they do not know one another, they have little in common with one another, and they vote against one another. An educated, well-trained, and honest 135 America and the Americans gentleman, who would be the very best ser vant of the poor, because he knows what they do not know, and because he would neither rob them nor wilfully deceive them, is often cut off from political service because those who ought to be his constitu ents do not know him, and distrust him mainly because he is not one of them. It is perhaps true that in France, Eng land, and Germany the rich and the poor are not educated together much less so in France and Germany than in Eng- ciassdh- land but the various classes are not so % n utop in unacquainted with one another, not on such self-conscious and restrained terms with one another as they are here. They meet oftener, strange to say, on a common basis, of every man on his individual merit, without regard to rank, position, or fortune, than here. Germany. In Germany they are educated together, because there the public schools and uni versities, which are open to all, and very cheap, are better than any private educa tional institutions. The same is true of France, and in both 136 Class Distinctions France and Germany they serve side by France. side in the army. In England they know one another in the army and navy, and they meet one an other continually in the hunting- field, at cricket and foot-ball, and in the country, and out-of-door life, lived by so many Eng- England. lish people. The English laborer touches his hat to the village squire, but he is, as a matter of fact, on far friendlier, and even more intimate, terms with him than is the American millionnaire with any man, or men, of similar position in his neighbor hood. In France, especially, but in England and Italy also, your servants are your friends, sometimes very dear friends ; but there is none of that here, just where one might expect it. They do not take care of one another here, in the case of masters and servants, as I delight to take care of servants old Francois at home, and he delights to take care of me, only in different capacities ; they do not even care for one another ; they simply hire and are hired. In Europe there is a traditional feeling 137 America and the Americans of responsibility on the part of the power ful for the weak, of the rich for the poor. The squire s house is often the hospital, the bank, and the asylum for his poorer neighbors. On the other hand, the American millionnaire with exceptions, notable exceptions indeed is the most heedlessly irresponsible magnate that the world has seen since the days of feudalism. The enormous establishments maintained by French, English, and Austrian men of wealth are laughed at here, but often Responsi- enough they represent the responsibility wea y itL those men feel to their neighborhood and their neighbors, and are far more demo cratic than the wasteful luxury of Amer ica s rich men and women, who recognize no such responsibility to any neighborhood or to any neighbors. One comes to feel here that no art is more difficult than the art of being rich. This country needs a number of univer sities devoted solely to such instruction. "Beggars mounted run their horse to death." It is the rich as well as the poor who are making this republic a land of 138 Class Distinctions class distinctions, a land of privileges, a land of social and political jealousies. Minor and official distinctions of class, of creed, of service, of rank, are largely ob literated, it is true, but nowhere in the Heedless world is the line so rudely drawn between rS the rich and the poor, between the master and the menial, between the workers who do not use their hands and the laborers who do, as here. In Europe there is great diversity of striving; men are working for different ends ; many men know when they have enough, and drop out of the race, to live contentedly on what they have. But not so in America. The word "enough" is the loneliest, and the least wealth the often employed, word in the American ard. * a vocabulary. There is no diversity of striv ing; all are striving for money, money, money. This makes the race fast and fu rious, and competition and rivalry bitter, and not always honorable. Money here is tyrant, as it is tyrant nowhere else. Men will do for money here what men will do for money nowhere else. 139 America and the Americans In Europe men are divided into many classes, and these different classes have their particular rivalries and competitions. The scram- Here all men are in the one colossal class J dollars. of the money-makers, all fighting one ai^j/ other, all fearful of one another, and all rec ognizing but one class distinction that between those who have and those who have not. It cannot surely be long before this state of things must crystallize into politi cal parties. Heretofore men have divided along political lines, soon they will divide along social lines ; and then, if I mistake not, the national barometer will begin go ing down toward a point marked The Deluge. I find myself surprised at myself in mak- ciimatic ing these observations. The climate here is intoxicating, the people are optimistic, the material wealth is enormous the act ual valuation of all real and personal prop erty in the United States is 325,185,- 455,985 of francs and yet I cannot put away from me the impression that another, and an even more ferocious, struggle, bc- 140 Class Distinctions tween those who have and those who have not, looms not far off upon the horizon. I can see the mortgage -burdened West and Southwest maddened by demagogues demanding some prosperity-killing, politi cal or economic, or financial, change. I can see frightened Eastern capitalists Frightened sending money to Canada, to England, and l to Germany for safe-keeping. I can see holders of American securities in Europe literally dumping them back upon the market here. I can see the social jealousies, that the Americans either will not, or cannot, see, exchanging surly looks for rifles, and frowns for gunpowder ; and then I can see these seventy millions in such a turbulent death- struggle as would awe the world, even the world which still hears the re-echoing shrieks and groans and laughter of our own Revolution. Thank God, you and I will not be there to see ! Please God, it may be a false vision and I a mistaken prophet ! A vision. But unless the people here who know, and have, awaken to some sort of sense of re sponsibility, and the better class of news- 141 America and thz Americans papers cease to tamper with the dynamite of class prejudice, trouble is sure to come. It is true that thus far the sturdy good Underlying sense which underlies the indifference and good sense. , . . . . recklessness of these people has always come to the front in the hour of danger, and triumphed over all obstacles and all at tacks. But it is well to notice that each time the attack is more furious than before, the anarchism more outspoken, and the spread of discontent covers a wider area. So long as the social questions can be en tangled with matters concerning the cur rency and the tariff, the rival camps are themselves split into parties, but if the battle is ever fairly engaged between the The -would- would -haves and the have - gots, there the have- promises to be a reign of terror for awhile. After each election, people forget how frightened they were before it. It were well if they could remember their fright for some time after as well as before ! 142 XI Concord, Plymouth, and Cam bridge jY visits to Concord and Plym outh were, I must confess, dis appointments. At Concord the houses where certain great men have lived, the streets through which they were wont to walk, and in the neighborhood certain spots consecrated to the first out breaks of the War of the Revolution, are shown to you. To the foreigner, whose imagination is First im- ^111 ii i i prcssions of not fired by these recollections, the place Concord, is but a barren country village. The names of Emerson and Thoreau were more or less familiar, but some of the other names, that of a man named Alcott, for example, who, I was told, was a great philosopher, were names I had never seen and never heard. M3 America and the Americans American The insularity of Americans is very much insularity. , ~ , . , to the fore on such occasions. They are lacking in that culture which consists in fine discriminations. Open and undis guised surprise was expressed at Concord that I had never heard of Alcott. But when I came to inquire what he had writ ten, it turned out that he had written noth ing ; and yet the foreigner was supposed to know the distinguishing features of this literary foundling of a little town in Massachusetts. It reminds one of a child who says to the total stranger : Why, my name s Jeanne ; don t you know me? " After the rather pompous young cler gyman who accompanied us on our tour about Concord had retailed to me the literary and political gossip of the place, as though each minute fragment were a commonplace of European discussion, I could not refrain from a little subdued im pertinence. When he asked me, therefore, what Americans were best known abroad they always say "abroad" here in refer ring to Europe, as though we were anchored off their coast somewhere I told him that 144 Concord, Plymouth, and Cambridge the two names I had heard most often were Akott those of Mark Twain and John L. Sullivan. L. Sullivan There is a grain of truth in this state ment, though, no doubt, this admission on my part left my reputation in Concord torn to tatters. But even though Emerson was foolish enough to say that Alcott had the finest mind since Plato, I never heard of him, and thousands of Frenchmen, Ger mans, and Englishmen of undoubted claims to literary eminence have never heard of him ; and though Concord bemoan our in tellectual limitations, I am bound to make the confession. The only things that I remember dis tinctly about Concord are this young cleri cal prig and a really fine statue by a sculptor named French. To say that I remember them for entirely different reasons, I owe it to the sculptor to admit at once. To Plymouth I went, accompanied by a genial and cultivated acquaintance, and it A guide to is due to him, rather than to Plymouth per- Plymouik - haps, that I owe my enjoyment of the jour ney. He was a scholar, a man of the world, and devoted to his own particular subject. US America and the Americans He had travelled, and had met men all over Europe, and so made no attempt to assume that my education had been neg lected because I was unfamiliar with the insular distinctions of a provincial com munity. But even at Plymouth the kindly gen tleman, who went about with us, devoted a good share of the day to an explanation, for my benefit, of the difference between Pilgrims, the Pilgrims and the Puritans. He seemed and plan- to think that most of the planetary disturb ances and many of the European complica tions of the day might be allayed if the difference between the Pilgrims and the Puritans were kept in mind. This absorbing interest in the affairs of the moment, and the affairs of one s own community, is an American trait. Per haps it is due to their isolation from the larger concerns of the world ; but what ever the cause, it is looked upon by most Americans as unpatriotic to see anything good outside of America. No criticism except political criticism is tolerated, even in the newspapers. It 146 Concord, Plymouth, and Cambridge is a fine quality in a man to stand by his friends, whether they are right or wrong, once they are in trouble ; it is a fine thing in the people of a nation to stand by their flag, once that flag is unfurled in battle ; but surely the frank criticism of one s friends and of one s country in their pros perity is not treason. But these people are personally and, as a nation, fearfully sensitive. Not to shout American . , *ii 111 sensitive the most absurd patriotic bombast all the ness. time is, for a politician, political suicide ; and not to do much the same thing in the case of the private individual, is to earn the reputation of being finical. This ten dency protects each community, and the nation at large, in a narrow-mindedness only equalled in Turkey and China. I was told that there are only twenty- four towns in all Massachusetts without a free public library, and no children to whom are not offered the very best opportunities for free schooling. Here, as in so many other departments of life in America, the theory is excellent, but the results in prac tice are by no means what this and other America and the Americans Democratic democratic nostrums promised. There are nostrums. . ., . ... , jails, and criminals, and insane asylums, drunkards, and tenement-houses, and polit ical jobbery in Massachusetts, just as there are in France, in England, and Italy, and, no doubt, in much the same proportion to the inhabitants. As for the country towns, I have never seen anywhere, out of Italy, such numbers of apparently unoccupied young men and boys. At every railway-station you see them, at the street-corners you see them, Transcend- and, unless they are Transcendental philos- entalloaf- J . ers. ophers on the browse for epigrams, as my slim young Concord clergyman would have me believe, they probably get into mis chief just as do other idlers in countries where there are fewer public libraries and fewer free schools. Travelled Americans have often told me how they have been amazed in France, in England, and in Germany, to find how little the people of the interior towns and villages know of the great world outside them. But here this indifference takes an other and worse form. 148 Concord, Plymouth, ami Cambridge At Concord and Plymouth and other towns, not excepting Boston even, there is a complete self-satisfaction with the very little they do know, and a calm assumption Seif-suffi- that they are the ideal communities of the world, toward which the benighted com munities of the rest of the world are striv ing, which, if it were not so sad, would be highly ridiculous. Here is a great State with only twenty- four villages which lack free libraries, and in it the largest university in the nation, and for the last twenty-five years not a book has been written there which has inteiie**ai been universally welcomed, as were the writings of Longfellow, Lowell, Emerson, and Whittier. Indeed, since the death of Webster, Sumner, and Andrew, there has not been produced by this community a great man, unless, perhaps, it be the pres ent bishop of the State.* It is often said in America that their great advantage over the rest of the world lies in the fact that no traditions and no * This was written before the death of the late Bishop Brooks. ED. 149 America and the Americans prejudices stop the way to progress. On the other hand, what is always forgotten is the fact of their hide-bound attachment to their own theories, no matter what the outcome may be in practice. Theory and The theory of universal education pre scribed by law is a good theory, but in practice it has neither produced an excep tional number of scholars, nor has it de creased the number of dependents and de linquents, or cleansed politics. The theory of checks for the transfer of luggage is a good theory and sounds very convenient ; in practice it delays the arrival of luggage, causes the traveller to miss his connections, and in the end is ruinously expensive. The theory of many mechanical contrivances for personal intercourse, such as the type writer, the microphone, short-hand, and the telephone is a good theory ; but in practice it fails notably to compete with the per sonal service of Europe. rhe theory The theory of the political equality of 1 every man is a good theory, and it has, be it said in its favor, done away with a cer tain servility of the lower to the upper 5 Concord, Plymouth, and Cambridge classes ; but in practice it has ostracized good manners and obedience in all classes, and put the management of New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and other cities in the hands of unprincipled and indifferent money-grabbers. The theory of one man one vote sounds well, but, strange to say, in every presidential election no such thing exists even. In each State every voter throws his ballot not for his one can didate, but for the whole number of elec tors allotted to his State. Hence each The value voter in New York State votes for thirty- six votes for President, while in the smaller States, of course, the voter s vote is of less value. It is true that the people are not blind ed by prejudice, but they are drunk with theories which their lack of a certain inter national experience renders them incapable of criticising. I am happy to say that the above was written before my visit to Har vard College. For once there, I was told that the rest of the country looks upon Harvard College as a hot-bed of political toryism. But that again seems to me to be America and the Americans due to another theory, with its attendant bad practice. The theory of this land is free speech and free thought, but the practice is the muzzling of both. There are men here, and elsewhere, who, because they are not political hirelings, and because they write and speak what they believe, without ref erence to whether it will or will not ac crue to their personal popularity, by this very putting into practice of the national theory, are harshly criticised, ridiculed, and stormed at, by almost every news paper in the country. When a man s ancestors, some of them, have died for free thought and free speech, he has a warm place in his heart for any in stitution which insists upon this privilege, whether he agrees altogether with what is thought, and said sometimes, or not. I saw the usual sights here. In the beau- Memories tiful hall built to commemorate the men who fell in battle in 1861-65, I saw s ^ x or seven hundred of the students dining to gether, waited upon by the negroes, whom their fellows fought to free from slavery. 152 Concord, Plymouth, and Cambridge I attended a lecture on the Fine Arts, and another on English, and found the lat ter particularly interesting from the novel way in which the subject was handled. I got up early one morning and went to the chapel for morning prayers. Until re cently the attendance on morning prayers Prayers . . and athlet* has been obligatory, now it is voluntary. . The attendance was very small, and most of those present were, I was informed, men in training for the various athletic contests, who are obliged by their regimen to get up early. With the usual American inge nuity, "prayers" are made use of to en force this law of athletics, for thus it can be seen easily by the trainers and captains of " teams " and " crews," that their men are out of bed when they should be. There is one official chaplain to the uni versity, but clergymen of different creeds take charge of the religious work in turn, and when one or another of these is in charge, I was told that more of the students attend the services. Some of the newer buildings are costly and handsome, but the older buildings, in America and the Americans Meagre en tertaining. Academic compari- what is called "the college yard," cannot bear comparison with the buildings of the different colleges of the English universities. The entertaining here is on a modest scale, and only here and there a professor who has, or whose wife has, money, is en abled to entertain to any continued extent. The salaries paid are larger than in French or German universities, but nothing like as large as those received by the heads of col leges in England. The president is a man of admirable presence and distinguished speech, who en joys that paradoxical, but most genuine, popularity the popularity of the unpopular man. People believe in him without lik ing him ; while, unless my impressions are wrong, the majority of America s popu lar idols are men whom the people applaud without trusting them. I met some of the students, and if I may permit myself a broad, and, I must admit also, a hasty, generalization, I should say that there are fewer men here with the wide culture of the universities of Europe, but perhaps more who have devoted them- 154 Concord, Plymouth, and Cambridge selves to specialties, particularly the spe cialties of science. One might fancy that there would be a good deal of intercourse between the uni versity men, both professors and under- Cambridge and Boston, graduates, and the people of Boston, but I am told there is comparatively little. Many Boston men are graduates of the col lege, and many have sons there, but either on account of the provincialism of Boston society as a whole, or through lack of so cial enterprise on both sides, the good that might be expected to result from a large university and a large city, side by side, is not present. Harvard, recruiting its students from all over America, is not up to Boston socially ; and Boston, recruiting its fashionable peo ple, year by year, from the ranks of the newly rich, is not up to Harvard intellect ually. Whatever the reason, the fact re mains the same, and is another indication of the narrowness of much of the social and intellectual life here. 155 XII American English 5O stranger may visit Boston without discovering that there is a timid consciousness on the part of Bostonians that it is a profitable thing to hear English as spoken Boston in Boston. The broad " a " is as much a English. p roc i uct O f Boston, so they think there, as codfish-balls or baked beans. A spinster of uncertain years is no more titteringly offended when you underestimate her years than is Boston when you allude to the pro nunciation of the English language there. My own acquaintance with English is too slight to permit of my posing as a fair critic on this question. Still, even I could not fail to note differences in the different parts of the States that I had the honor to visit. The soft, guttural speech of the South erner, the sharp, metallic nasality of the West, the dodging of the letter < r " in 156 American English 11 girl " and " bird " and " shirt," and the like, in New York, all these were soon fa miliar to me. The Bostonian, however, assumes that he speaks like an Englishman. Fortunately, for him, he does not ; unfortu nately for him, in many cases he tries to do so. Sometimes the conquered are the con querors. In Boston the Bunker Hill Monu ment commemorates a victory, but the neo-Briticisra of their speech proves that here again the conquerors made endur ing conquests. " Highfalutin" and "gerrymander," American* and "buncombe" and "variety show" (for music-hall entertainment), " notion counter," " gone where the woodbine twin- eth " (meaning up the spout), "busted" (meaning bankrupt), "spread-eagleism," " bull-doze," " catch on," " put-up job," " too previous," political "pull," " bump tious," "give us a rest," and many other words and phrases, are, if not academic, still capital additions to the vocabulary of everyday conversation. The stranger greets these brand-new lin- 157 America and tbe Americans gual visitors with effusive delight. The stranger, too, rather admires the grand- fatherless millionnaires, and views with pleasure their doughty sons and daughters clambering up the social ladder. The American, strange to say, is apparently the last to appreciate what are the genuine novelties and the real charms of his own civilization. He is all too often ashamed of the wrong things, like the college-edu cated son of a man who, without any breed ing, has made his " pile." If there be a quality for which " bun combe " or " highfalutin " or "spread- eagleism " supplies the exact interpretation and there is then these words ought to be welcome. If there is a stage of civili zation in a new country where sheer per sonal prowess hews its way to success with out any of the advantages of university training, then the exponent of that ought to be welcomed, and not apologized for. Assumed There is a twittering self-consciousness about the Americans however except on the Fourth of July which makes them un certain as to what is good form and what 158 American English is bad form, in both their speech and their manners. One would find himself quite at fault, should he accept the satisfied and self- glorifying statements of the newspapers and the political orators about " the greatest country on earth," " God s own country," " we can lick creation," " a hundred years of prosperity unequalled in the aeons of all the planets," as being the serious estimate of themselves, held by most Americans. All that is merely the self-deceptive boast ing of a people who are in reality diffident about many of their institutions, about their manners, and even about their speech. " Consuetudo certissima loquendi magis- tra writes Quintilian, and what the Ameri- en>forf. cans lack, above all things, are precedents and experience. This dearth of fixed stand ards in manners and speech, and of any class acknowledged to be worthy leaders in such matters, leaves each community and every man to shift for himself. This ought to produce a picturesque variety of manners and of speech which would be both inter esting to, and respected by, the foreign visi tor. As a matter of fact, however, the 159 America and the Americans Americans " hanker " (first-rate word this) after just those precedents, just those cere monious formalities, for which they have no equivalents. True, this is more apparent in the East than in the West and South, but in my two visits, with an interval between of some years, I can see that their self-sufficiency is lessening, and that their striving to adopt the manners, customs, clothes, ceremonies, and formalities of what the newspapers and the "buncombe" orators are pleased to call " the effete monarchies of Europe," is spreading ever farther into the interior. It is only in the larger cities that the newspapers can be depended upon for good English, nor can much confidence be placed in them even, as authorities. The mass of people who read their local newspa pers are not improved in their writing or speaking of English, thereby. foumaiism I believe I am right in stating that it is only since the late war that newspapers here have been profitable enough to em ploy first-rate men. In France, and in England, the very best men from Jules 1 60 American English Simon to Zola, and from Lord Salisbury down, have been proud to enroll themselves as journalists. It is only within the last thirty years here, that the newspapers have improved in tone sufficiently to make it at all usual for the better class of educated men to be connected with them in any capacity. It was my pleasure, and my profit, some TWO jour* - r ^ J -iTT-ii nalists. years ago to meet Mr. George William Curtis, and since that time I have met Mr. Charles Dana. The former was a very un usual type of gentleman, and a man of deli cate humor, refined speech, and unbending integrity ; while the latter is a scholar in many different fields, and an amateur in everything. Such men as these, and there are doubtless many others, mark, in the field of journalism, the sharp contrast, which seems to me, the more I travel here, to be the salient feature of the civilization. You no sooner make up your mind at the tumble-down wharf to which your steamer is tied, that you have landed at a frontier town, than you marvel at the fin ished luxury of your rooms at the hotel. 161 America and the Americans You are about to make a generalization from the beefsteak and ice-cream dinner sharp of your neighbor in the hotel restaurant, c again ts when you dine off gold, and drink from crystal, at the house of your friend s friend ; you prepare to damn the news papers after reading the lust, lechery, and larceny headed columns of one or another journal, when you are surprised into hesi tation by a witty half column in the Sun or a dignified discussion in the Tribune, though even the best edited of them can not refrain from calling names, and apply ing vulgar epithets, in -true street-arab fashion. No country in the world that I have visited tempts you so often to say " all men are liars," or something worse, and brings you up so often with a round turn, to tempt you into extravagant praise. Then, too, in this matter of the use of English, either spoken or printed, a French man hesitates to make categorical state ments. It was, alas ! one of my own coun trymen who, translating a French culinary recipe into English, wrote : " The rabbit 162 American English wants to be skinned alive, the hare prefers to wait." The peculiar quality of American hu mor is apt to land a foreigner in many pit falls. So much of the newspaper writing and of the everyday speech of the people is replete with gross exaggerations, that one is at a loss very often to know what is meant seriously. I distinctly remember the puzzled look American. on the face of a distinguished French dip lomat at a dinner in Washington, when one of the guests, without a smile, told how two burglars had broken into the house of Jay Gould, but before the police could be summoned they were robbed of their tools. The so-called funny papers appear each week with page after page teeming with jokes and stories of this description. There is a certain sadness in this very humor. I have often thought that in the case of in dividuals, as well as in the case of the pro fessional journalistic purveyors of fun, this universal love of gross exaggeration and of shocking contrasts is due to a certain fa talism of the people. 163 America and the Americans Humor and The sharp changes of fortune and of local condi- . , . . , , , ... tions. social position, the sudden springing into political prominence of this man or that, the father a pedler, the son a millionnaire ; the grandfather penniless, the grandson an entertainer of princes ; the mother an Irish washerwoman, the daughter the wife of a prince ; these changes, so out of the steady line of development, give a fatalistic tinge to life here. Consequently, there is much trusting to luck, much discontent with the steady grind, which is all life has for most of us. The newspapers parade and picture to the masses these almost miraculous changes of the wheel of fortune, and make the people in many cases to look upon the commonplace methods of earning, saving, and steady, uneventful work, as distasteful and unfair. Fate has this prize for that one, or this blank for me. They have not lived long enough here to know, or to care much about, the theory of averages, or to believe very strongly in the possible hap piness of the golden mean. The language itself, the speech of the 164 American English man in the street, and the writing in the more vulgar news-sheets, are moulded somewhat by this sadness and discontent on the one hand, and by this turbulent and accidental happiness produced by marvel lous changes on the other. A surprise, an exaggeration, a success, Occidental the winning ticket in the lottery, are ever Fataltsm> to the fore in the minds of many as a pos sibility. Who may not " strike ile," who may not find coal or clay on his property, who may not " strike it rich," in a gold or silver mine ? Nature herself, from this great wealthy lap of hers, may tumble out a precious gift into the hands of the least likely passer- by. Language is, after all, but the passing cloud-picture of the mind. The reticence and the carefully pruned phrases of the Briton, the gorgeous compliments of the Eastern races, the hazy, all-defining, par enthetic speech of the Germans, the clean- cut epigrammatic speech of my own land, and this grotesque humor of exaggeration or underestimation so common here, are 165 America and the Americans all typical of the men and the minds be hind them. Be it said that to my ears, at least, the English of their best people is equal, if not better, than that of the same class in Great Britain. Of the American voice, however, one cannot speak so flatteringly. There is a hard, rasping, metallic quality about it. This, I believe, is due in part to the cli mate, for it is more noticeable in the mid dle West and in northern New England than in the South and along the milder parts of the coast, though the negroes, who have been here now for a century, have still very soft, and sometimes even sweet, voices. An But given a self-confident, perhaps short- acidulated , . , . . , . . .. vestal. haired and independent, spinster from Maine, and nowhere else in the world of spoken language is vocalization so distress ing to the ear. The general tendency, too, seems to be to speak much too loud. Men and women in hotels and tram-cars and railway-trains seem, by the loud pitch of their voices, to invite you to share what 166 American English they are saying. The same publicity per vades their speech which pervades their lives. It is a Frenchman who says that his only The voice objection to solitude is that there is no one ,. near to whom he may speak of its charm. The American might well say that his only objection to solitude is that there is no crowd to elbow him, or to listen to him. This loud, piercing, unmodulated voice, reflects the love of a crowd, of bustle, and much business. I am writing to you, of course, of the men and women i n the street, so to speak. Well- bred people here do not yell in their draw ing-rooms, nor do they screech at their dinner-tables, but the general impression one receives of speech and voice is as I have described it. Both are too loud. The haw-hawing hesitancy of the English man even, " comes as a poultice to heal the blows of sound," after much of this hard, piercing, and often rasping, speech. A Democracy must necessarily produce a dis tinct quality of voice. Where all are free to speak, where all assert the right to be 167 America and the Americans heard, the voices that are to survive must be loud and distinct. A man may look like a monkey, and yet turn out to be a philosopher ; a man may dress like a vagabond, and yet have the in tuitions of a scholar and a gentleman ; the face, the expression of the eyes, the dress, the manners even, may all be deceptive, but the voice and speech of men and wom- aristocracy. ^ dassify them infallibly. Gentle VOicCS and simple speech are the heritage of the gentle and the simple alone. Princes who are peasants lack them, peasants who are princes have them, and here as elsewhere one finds princes who are peasants at heart, and peasants who are nature s princes. 168 XIII Travel a rAmricaine JN leaving Boston I made my first acquaintance with the American sleeping-car. During that night- journey I was impressed as never before with the demoralizing effects of the theory of democracy when put in practice. The American cars are long and narrow, with a passage-way running down the cen tre, from door to door, and seats on each side. Each car of the common pattern will seat eighty or more people, and the Pull man, or more expensive cars, a few less. For an hour or more I sat in one of the com mon cars, in which you are entitled to a seat for the payment of the usual fare in the others you pay something additional. There are no compartments, there is, of Personal course, no privacy. The conductor comes fri and goes, slamming the doors at each end 169 America and the Americans of the car as he enters and passes out. Another under-official sticks his head in, now and again, and shouts the names of stations, and also slams the door. An imp A of infernal origin wends his way up and peripatetic . 1-1 re fiend. down the aisle, offering newspapers, maga zines, fruit, chewing-gum, smelling-salts, cigars, candy which being interpreted means bon-bons for sale, and shouting the while at the top of his lungs. He pitches parcels of chewing-gum, boxes of bon-bons, magazines, and paper-covered books into your lap, leaves them a moment, and then returns to collect them again. Apparently there is no redress for the impertinences of this youth. To elderly gentlemen chewing-gum is given to hold, matrons receive copies of sporting-journals, copies of Zola or Paul de Kock are given to maidens, to nurses with children are, at the discretion of this young devil, given apples or nuts or candy, for which the children cry when he returns to collect them. This position, which it would seem re quires the sagacity and discrimination of a 170 Travel a I Americaine Ulysses, is filled by a mere apple-giving young Paris, who, by his careless distribu tion of highly seasoned literature and de structive edibles and chewibles, may de bauch the minds, and upset the digestions, of scores of innocent travellers. Here again I pause to express my aston ishment to think that I have the audacity to attempt to describe these bewildering Americans even to my own sister. No other people would submit to have this travel-disturber let loose upon them. No down-trodden Armenian but what would slay a Turk, were a Turk allowed to tort ure him in this fashion ; no Chinaman who would not rise and strangle a Japanese conqueror who should attempt to tease him, by the hour, by the mile, by the whole journey, in this manner. These good Americans pay the railroad company a round sum for transportation, and then permit themselves to be put in a cage, with a monkey in uniform, who shoves baskets of saliva-polished apples un der their noses, who tumbles cheap litera ture into their laps, who plays Tantalus to 171 America and the Americans their children with indigestible sweets, and who yells his nasalized menu in their ears from start to finish of their journey. I re peat, who can understand, who can make comprehensible, such a people, to one who has not seen them at home ? These cars are the typical illustration of democracy in practice. Here at last the theory is in full working order for inspec- Practicai tion. In my car there are a hundred people. tTo n of rt They have all paid the same amount, they democracy- 11 ,. travel at the same rate of speed, they are treated exactly alike. Each seat is as good as, and no better than, every other. Sol omon and LeBaudy, Socrates and Smindy- rides, St. Francis and Hippocleides, wise man and fool, philosopher and debauchee, saint and sensualist, here they are at last all together, every man on an equality with his neighbor, every man treated just like every other man, and now, how do we like it ? I am a republican, the reddest of red re publicans they call me at home, but I do not like it. I do not like it because everyone is necessarily brought, in point of discom- 172 Travel a I Americaine fort at least, to the level of the lowest. A German I know him by the " Also auf wicdersehen / " spoken to his friend as the train rolled out of the station takes off his boots, puts up his stockinged feet on the rail of the seat, fits his head into a corner of the window near him, and goes to sleep, to snore. Half a dozen seats in front of me is a woman with a baby. The baby, fresh from heaven, is doubtless an aristocrat. The conductor, the other official, and the train- A dis- monkey slam doors, and yell the baby into Aristocrat. a frenzy. It wails and cries and screams. I pity the mother, to be sure, but as I have none of the compensating comforts of that baby when it crows and goos and smiles, I see no reason why, with a hundred oth ers, this baby should play upon my nerves as though I were a zither, and the baby an automatic thumb-ring, worked by electric ity. I have talked about equality in my day, and sometimes, too, of fraternity, but now that I am a prisoner in this elongated Over-heated cage of equality, heated to the point of suf- c focation no wonder catarrh, pneumonia, 173 America and the Americans and consumption play havoc here rushing through space propelled by that non -recog nizer of persons, steam, I am bound to say that I like it not. Equality at There may be a saint in this car, but its worst. . what can his odor of sanctity do to miti gate the evils of this unwholesome and overheated atmosphere? There may be a sage in this car, but what can his quiet thoughts do to compensate for those infan tile shrieks ? There may be a philosopher sitting within a few yards of me, but what can he do to guard the innocent against the insidious advances of that purveyor of literary and candied nuisances ? Does not equality in this sense mean merely the dead level of the lowest ? Ah, but it is replied, no man who thinks, sup poses for a moment that equality means more than political equality, equality be fore the law. But, pray, what does this political equality portend ? Have not the masses in their hands the power to turn this nation into just such a company as I am describing? Is this indeed not the more likely outcome of democracy carried to 174 Travel $ I Americaine its ultimate point ? Le mediocrite inquire etjalouse gemit de tous les succes, parce que le champ de genie se retreat sans cesse a ses faibles yeux. What may a tax on incomes, on corpo rations, on railroads, on great commercial companies not do toward levelling all down to the feeblest ? And why may not these Possible jealous and discontented voters bring about just such a state of things, where commer cial shrewdness, where inventive talent, where thrifty investing of one s surplus, may be made fruitless ? I see no reason. The Constitution itself is subject to amend ments under certain conditions, and noth ing else stands in the way. That car full of overheated sovereigns, each with the sceptre of a vote in his hands, made me shiver. I admit this the more frankly, because if my critics pooh- pooh at me, they must needs do the same at the scores of financiers who re-invested large sums in England during the late war, and at many others, who have once or twice of late years, during a financial or political panic, sent large deposits of money to Ca- 175 America and the Americans nadian banks or hidden away their gold. I am not alone in thus imagining possible dis asters, I am only alone in having no reason for not confessing what I think. I find as a rule that most Americans are little disturbed by such a line of discussion. The immense wealth of the country, the astounding progress of the last hundred years, and the terrible strain of the War of the Rebellion so successful ly borne, these give them confidence and make them hopeful. Then, too, they are not, as a people, seriously interested in the graver problems of life. This same car full of people is illustra tive of another feature of this civilization, namely, the dislike of solitude, the love of publicity. I had the audacity on one oc- An editor casion to ask a certain editor how it was ailii H that people permitted his journal to print their names so continually. He looked at me as a cat might look if asked why the mice did not come out and share the rug before the fire with her. "I have hun dreds of notes, some anonymous, some signed, sent me describing how this one 176 Travel d VAmericaine or that participted in this or that festivity or was present at this or that function ! I will not say that everybody is pleased to see his name in print, but most peo ple are, and some people feel injured if their names are omitted when they think that they should have been inserted. There are men and women in this very The light of city," he went on, " who, it is well known, ^" send anonymously to the newspapers puffs and gossip about themselves, or their friends or relatives whom they are endeavoring to boost up the social lad der." This long funnel of a car contained many people who enjoyed this close prox imity of strangers. Many of the hotels make no provision for privacy, and guests are expected to frequent the public rooms, and, be it said, the guests as a rule prefer this. I have been in a small inn in Nebraska where we were all obliged to come from our rooms to perform our ablutions to gether downstairs. The large summer hotels of which 177 America and the Americans An adventure at the White House. more later offer hardly more privacy than bee-hives, and the parlors, piazzas, and din ing-rooms are liked because there every body is close to, and meets, everybody else. Very many people here, I was surprised to find, although they can afford to live apart, in houses of their own, much prefer what is called " hotel -life " and live in hotels and boarding-houses, from choice. There is more life and go and change, one sees more people, one is left less to one s self, and many Americans, both men and women, prefer this. I shall never forget on my former visit to America my adventure at the President s residence in Washington. I was taken there by a member of the federal Senate. We met in the hall downstairs a negress who was one of the servants. She asked me if I would like to see the President. Of course I said " yes." Whereupon I followed her upstairs, she knocked, then opened a door, and, to my horror, there I was intruding upon the President of the United States, without excuse or invitation. 178 Travel a I Amtricaine I was not thrown out of the window, I was invited to be seated, and President Hayes and I had a chat, and there my es teemed friend, the senator, afterward found me. It may be that this particular Presi dent was peculiar in his domestic arrange ments, but I could not help wondering how such intrusions could be looked upon as other than a bold-faced robbery of the peoples time and energy, as represented in their chief magistrate. I am told, however, that the people take ,.- rr* i i todict ipsos offence at any official who attempts to se- elude himself, or who puts up barriers between him and them. Just how, much- engaged public officers contrive to do their necessary work puzzled me somewhat. I suggested, perhaps impertinently, that every public official be enclosed in a transparent cell of some kind, so that he might at all times be open to inspection by the peo ple without being interrupted by them. When I returned to my own car after my sojourn in the other, I found a scene of great activity. A negro servant was per forming a miracle. He lifted up the floor 179 America and the Americans of the car, he pulled down the ceiling, and African from obscure places he produced curtains, -.nancy. pillows and sheets, blankets and mattresses, and with great rapidity and dexterity he transformed the whole car into a series of curtained compartments. He pulled aside my curtain with a grin, and lo ! there was a bed, and above that another bed, and in the upper one an oc cupant, and, if you please, a woman ! He apologized for this by saying that the car was very crowded, and in a conversation with him later I learned that, as a rule, it is intended that only men, or only wom en, should be put in layers behind the same pair of curtains. However, to bed I went, undressing with some difficulty, and, though the air was close, I slept well. In the morning there was a scene of indescribable confusion. Men, women, and children, dishevelled and partly dressed, appeared at intervals from Democratic behind the curtains, making their way, some to one end, some to the other, of the car, where in a very small compart ment one performed his ablutions. Every- 180 Travel a VAmericaine one was good-humored, and we brushed our hair and rinsed our mouths, and washed our hands in innocency, fraternity, and equality, and, be it said, with soap and water furnished to all alike by the railroad company. As if by magic, under the manipulations />// of this negro prestidigitator, the floors and ceilings opened, the beds disappeared, and we were in our seats again. In some of the trains in which you travel for days and nights together on a long journey, there are libraries, pianos, smoking-rooms, barber shops, and dining-cars, and let me not omit to mention type-writers what a busy peo ple they are, to be sure ! The emigrant trains have cars no better than the old fourth -class cars in Germany. People in the less luxurious carriages get out at the stations here and there and make a hasty meal. I should much like to have the dissecting of one traveller who at one of these stop ping-places, in seven minutes by my watch, ate two little bird-dishes full of raw oysters, four ham sandwiches, a large section of 181 America and the Americans pie, which looked as though it were stuffed with insects mince pie, they call it and drank one glass of beer and two bowls of cafe au lait, and then hurried to the train Doughnuts with two doughnuts and an apple a dough- anddyspef- ,. -L j i r J J 1. sia. nut is a braided mass of sweetened dough fried in lard. The Lord have mercy on his wife and children if they are his com panions when he undertakes to digest these things ! No wonder he was sallow and thin ! No wonder the social aristocracy here is recruited in more than one instance from those enriched by the sale of patent medicines ! 182 XIV The Black Belt ERE it not for the fact that there is about one negro to every eight whites in the United States, the sleeping- cars might solve the race - problem here. The employment of negroes in this wise is assuredly well adapted to the negro, and grateful to the whites. The negro is singu larly deft of hand, generally good-humored and obliging, and obsequious for a small sum in silver. But my visits to Washington, Norfolk, and one or two other places in the South, showed me how grave is this problem here, of which we reck so little, and, indeed, hear so little, in Europe. In the four States of Virginia, North A few Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia, the figures white population in 1870 was 2,319,152; in 1890 it had increased to 3,515,869. America and the Americans In those same four States the negro popu lation in 1870 was 1,865,447; in 1890 it had increased to 2,744,285. In the eight States of Tennessee, Alabama, Mis sissippi, Louisiana, and the four already mentioned, which together are called the white " Black Belt," the white population is and black - 1111 i population. 5,658,517; the black population, 5,155,- 124, and at the past rate of increase the blacks will soon (if they do not now, the above figures being for 1890) outnumber the whites. In the three States of Mississippi, Lou isiana, and South Carolina, the negroes already outnumber the whites by half a million. But why, it may be asked, does this ever-increasing percentage of negroes con stitute a menace to the political prosperity of this great democracy ? For the same reason that so many other problems assume forbidding proportions, because here they are trying the experiment of being a democ racy, without being a democracy. These eight millions of slaves were freed, and then, as a political afterthought, the 184 The Black Belt suffrage was given to them, at a time when something like ninety per cent, of them were illiterate. It was the great President Lincoln him- President self who said, only a year before the war -view. " between the North and South broke out : " I am not, and never have been, in favor of bringing about in any form the social and political equality of the white and black races. There is a physical difference, which forbids them from living together on terms of social and political equality. And, inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together, there must be a position of superior and inferior, and I, as much as any other man, am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the whites." Common-sense, amounting to political genius, was the characteristic of this great American statesman, and in these few words just quoted is expressed what is prac tically the universal sentiment of thought ful Americans on this subject. To give these people the right to vote was a mis take, and one that has cost, and proba- 185 America and the Americans bly will cost, the American people very dear. There was undoubtedly much sectional feeling about the negroes as slaves, but there is none about the negro as an inferior. In Boston the negro is as much tabooed as he is in Norfolk. Almost fifty-seven per cent, of them are illiterate now, and even this, I was told, is very much under the real figure, for in some States they are required to read in order to vote, and they are all ambitious to be thought to be able to read, so that the statistician s work is peculiarly difficult. Black Of the total number of prisoners in the a criminail United States, 57,310 are whites, and 24,277 are negroes. In short, the blacks are as one to almost nine of the population, but as one to almost two of the criminals. Nor do these last figures take into account those of them who are summarily punished without process of law. It might be supposed, from these few figures perhaps, that I am proposing to myself an arraignment of the negroes. On the contrary, I like the negroes, what 186 The Black Belt I saw of them in America. We Europeans have none of the antipathy to the negro so common here, quite as common in the North as in the South, let me add. A negro in one of the Northern States Their social standing. could no more gain admittance as a mem ber to a first-class club, or as a guest in a first-class hotel, than to the dinner-table of a Southern planter. Equality in this as in other cases I have noted, is all very well as a theory, but in practice it is ad mitted to be absurd. In Virginia there are separate compartments even on the fer ries for the blacks and the whites ; and in many places they are not allowed to travel in the same cars with the whites, and be it not forgotten in this connection that the war closed some thirty years ago. Men born when the war opened are now men of mature years, men who have known nothing of slavery, men who can have bitter feelings on this subject only by the attenuated thread of inheritance or tradi tion, and yet these men have even a less friendly, and a more contemptuous, feeling toward the negroes than their ancestors. 187 America and the Americans Pray remember that I am not giving these impressions from what I have heard from politicians, or from what was said, so Non- to speak, a mon intention. No one knew of Sentiments, me as other than a Frenchman on a pass ing diplomatic errand, and I was not talked to, or talked at, as a man whom it was necessary to instruct or to influence. This printing of pages from my journal was no more in their thoughts than in mine, and this, instead of being a disadvantage, was a positive advantage ; the only inter est, if it have interest at all, of my journal being that I was merely a passing guest in America, and neither suspected, nor sus pecting myself, of being a future critic. Said a large planter to me as we were riding through his fields : " The great mis- A practical take they make in the North is in holding that they freed the negroes. They didn t free the negroes, they freed us!" He meant by that that he was no longer re sponsible as he had been before, and he spoke as though he were happier without the responsibility. In clubs, hotels, and private houses I 188 The Black Belt kept repeating the question : "Do you re gret the emancipation of the slaves ? The answer, without exceptions, was always the same hearty "No!" The only in dividuals who told me that they regretted the abolition of slavery were negroes. They are children in intellect and in morals, and many of them who had been slaves, and who are now free, would, no doubt, prefer to shift the responsibilities of life back on to a master s shoulders again. Even in so large a city as Norfolk the negroes retain their old-time customs. They come to the houses as servants, but they go back to their own cabins and small houses to sleep at night, and they deem it one of their rights to carry home with them, each evening, a basketful of scraps and odds and ends from the kitchen, and often, it is hinted, they do not confine their pickings to mere odds and ends. Small thefts, small lies, and living en African etk ics. libre grace or comme les oiseaux, are not counted among them as sins, though their religious enthusiasm at their own meetings is more violent than anything I have ever 189 America and the Americans seen anywhere else in the world. A cer tain negress was much hurt when she was dismissed for stealing one of her mistress s gowns, after giving as an excuse that she wanted it to be baptized in ! No doubt she considered the mistress as altogether lacking in piety of the right sort. I trust that I have not said too much of the pleasures of eating and drinking in America, but it were surely a mere mock ery of reality not to note the fried chicken, the waffles, the shad, the shad-roes (deli cious morsels), the corn-bread, the reed- birds, the terrapin, the ducks (red-head and canvas- back), the broiled robbins, the smoked hams, the variety of hot cakes and rolls, the melons, peaches and strawber ries of this, Brillat-Savarin s own country. Nor should I be content to let these pages go, without a word of the boundless Southern and charming hospitality of my Southern 1 y hosts, and the friends of my hosts. I know little of their past errors and trials, but I have every reason to know that now they are most generous and courteous. One hears occasionally from some widowed and 190 The Black Belt childless matron a note of bitterness about the past, but who would not forgive her that? There is far more bitterness of feeling between Frenchmen and Germans, and even between Frenchmen and Englishmen, than between the Southerners and the Northerners. There seems to be a gentle manly feeling that " we had a good fight for it, and we were beaten ; now let s say no more about it." If I may be permitted to say a word The carpet* in this rather delicate family controversy, it would be that the Northern politician of the small and conscienceless stripe has done more than anybody else since the war to keep up the irritation. He profits by a certain amount of sectional feeling, and, therefore, he does nothing to allay it. He knows as well as the Southerner that it is ruin to allow the negroes to exercise the suffrage uncontrolled in several of the States just after the war it was actual ruin and yet he harps upon the fact that the negro vote is not counted. In the District of Columbia the negro 191 America and the Americans does not vote, and several Northern federal senators voted that the negro be dis franchised there, and no one of them dreams of wishing now that it were other wise, it must be then a sign of hypoc risy to make so much of the fact that the negro vote is not counted in the South. It is not counted, it ought not to be counted, and to count it would mean bankruptcy and commercial prostration now, as was the case before. The mistake was made, and in the South they make the best prac tice they can of a bad theory, and to do anything else would only redound to their own and to the negroes ruin. There are notable exceptions; but to acteristics. ^ ^ ^ ne g roes are shiftless, CareleSS, good-natured, and improvident. Their code of morals is entirely different from that of civilized whites, either in Europe or in America. Their facial angle is seventy degrees, that of the white man eighty- two ; their morals are those of les oiscaux. San Domingo, Liberia, South Carolina, and Alabama at the close of the war when negroes were in political control are con- 192 The Black Belt elusive evidence of their inability to govern themselves; like ill-bred children, liberty has made some of them arrogant and in clined to push in where they are not wanted. These facts being true, it is, so it seems to me at least, a matter upon which South erners ought to be congratulated, and upon which all Americans ought to rejoice, that these millions of negroes in the South live in the midst of their white brethren in such security and peace. The lynchings and burning of negroes, Lynching. and other atrocious cruelties, are punish ments meted out for unmentionable crimes. In London, Paris, and Berlin the law is one thing; in Texas, which covers about the same area as Europe, and in other Southern States, swift legal redress is next to impossible without a standing army of police. Remember your own wives, sisters, and baby-girls ; remember that you are not in Paris or Lyons or Marseilles, but in a thinly populated wilderness, and see if your eyes do not wander instinctively to T 93 America and tbe Americans your gun-case or your pistol-drawer ! Re member that these Southerners are Saxons and Huguenots one or two hundred years away from home, and in this, as in many other painful affairs of this life, perhaps comprcndrc c est pardonntr. 194 XV Improvidence IT is in the South more espe cially, but it applies to the country at large, that one is shocked by the wastefulness of the Americans. At a certain house in Baltimore I was permitted to go into the kitchen. There must have been a dozen, perhaps twenty, negroes in these rooms below stairs. I asked my hostess if she found it necessary to have so many servants. "Oh, those An are not all my servants," she replied, " but there are always a lot of hangers-on in the kitchen ! " I could fancy the horror of my sister, of my mother, should such a sight greet their eyes on descending to their kitchen, but my hostess took it most good- humoredly, and answered the grins and the shining rows of white teeth, which America and the Americans greeted her in her own kitchen, with gra cious words and kindly nods. It is unfortunate that the majority of the house-servants in America are Irish and negroes, the two most wasteful and un economical races we know and of a differ ent creed from their masters. It was told me by one of the oldest employees in the most famous restaurant in New York, that twenty years ago, before there were as many well-conducted restaurants and ho tels as now, in their establishment, with French French cooks and European servants, they saved so much that was thrown away by other American proprietors of similar places, that their profits upon waste alone enabled them for years to remain beyond rivalry. "We made dishes out of what our neighbors would have thrown away, and dishes, too, that people from all over the country came to this historical restau rant to eat." It was a Frenchman who told me that, and I believe him. Of course it was not possible very often to visit the kitchens and to discover what was thrown away in the houses of my 196 Improvidence friends. But some of my hosts were so kind as to tell me the costs of their kitch- cost of ens, their servants, their stables, and their wine-cellars. Butter at five francs a pound, fresh eggs at three francs a dozen, cham pagne at one hundred and seventy-five francs a dozen and this not the best servants at the ruinous wages I have men tioned elsewhere, rents in proportion, and, worse than all, careless, uninterested ser vants, who clear up after each meal by tossing everything that is left into the refuse-heap. No wonder there are ever - increasing Europe complaints that it costs too much to live ^ f ^ fa here. No wonder thousands of American families have learnt the secret, and adopted the plan of going to Europe for a year, every now and then, to save money. The country itself has been somewhat to blame for this lack of economy. Iron, gold, silver, copper, wheat-fields for the mere ploughing, thousands of square miles of grazing-land for the taking, fish, flesh, fowl, and fruit in bewildering profusion, millions of acres of good land still unoccu- 197 America and the Americans pied ; no wonder such a wealthy mother, careless of her bounties, has made her children spendthrifts. I have met Americans abroad who lived at the best hotels, who seemed to have plenty to spend, but who here, I found, have three servants and entertain not at all. They make money fast, then spend that, then make more, and so on. We old-fashioned Europeans like to feel that we are living on our incomes, not on our capital, but here in the fresh be wilderment of ever-increasing wealth they spend their capital ; hence it is that many Americans in Europe give the impression of having more than they have. Not through any intention on their part, I fancy, to mislead, but merely because our standard o r expenditure is the income from capital, whue theirs is very ouen capital itself. Then, too, the burden of expenditure is not placed here as it is in Europe. The European looks forward to his own house, his own stable, to servants and domestic comfort. The American, all too often, 198 Improvidence saves on his home to spend outside of it. I mean by that, that there is to European eyes a disproportionate expenditure on the dress of the women and the children, on meals at restaurants, on theatre-going, on summer holidays, on general lavishness outside the home. People who in France and England would have servants enough, who would en tertain more in their homes, who would put aside each year for their children, who would rigidly restrict the outside expen ditures, are represented here by family af ter family, in hotels and boarding-houses, people who travel in Europe, who spend each year about what they earn, who enter tain seldom or never, and who do not know even what it means to be properly cared for by servants. You need travel only as far as Chicago Mushroom to see a city which fifty years ago was growth merely a traders post with a few log -huts, a city where a man-servant in the house, even now, is as rare as the egg of a great auk, and yet a city of enormous prosper ity. I was driven about in Chicago on a 199 America and the Americans coach with four horses, I visited two luxuri- ous clubs, I saw miles of expensive houses, . and I left cards at, at least, three houses where the door was opened by a slatternly woman-servant with her sleeves rolled up perhaps I called at an unusual hour ; I do not know as to that, none of us is infallible. We in France laugh a good deal at the overdressed women of the servant and lower middle class in England, but the Irish, Swedes, and Germans here appear in truly gorgeous raiment seal -skin and velvet and silk and plumes and flowers I have seen repeatedly on them and these good Americans pay them fabulous wages, receive in return the worst service in the world, and look surprised when you suggest that perhaps matters are a little upsidedown. I have seen a German woman, scarce able to speak English, with three children, done up in velveteen and silks and sashes, who at home would not dare to appear with her family so clad for fear of the wholesale ridi cule she would invite. These immigrants soon grasp the failing of the Americans, and presume upon their 200 Improvidence indifference and take advantage of their good-nature to an extent that simply dum- founds the European who has heard of how sharp, how shrewd, and calculating are the Americans. I sometimes think that these people who inebriation, have been rich for only two generations are prosperity. just a little mad. Money and prosperity have come so fast, immense fortunes have been made so quickly, the change from the most meagre and curtailed life of the first quarter of this century to the oriental pro fusion of expenditure in the larger cities now, has turned their heads. They fancy that the perpetual spring of prosperity bubbles up in this great land, and that they need take no care for the morrow. In the ten years, 1880-90, their debt de creased 5,152,786,300 francs, or more than 500,000,000 francs a year. In the aggregate of all expenditures, na tional, State, and local, the receipts for one year, lately, exceeded the expenditures by 77,914,460 francs. One must admit that such figures may make a people fool ishly confident. 201 America and the Americans What does this occidental nabob care i f servants rob him, laugh at him behind his back, and serve him ill ! What does he care if his wife dresses far beyond her needs or her station ! What does he care if in the drawing-rooms of New York one sees more jewels worn than in any of the pal aces of Europe ! What does he care if the poverty-stricken Irish, the needy Swedes, and Scandinavians, the penniless Italians, the cormorant Jews, the Poles and Hunga rians, and the Chinese until recently flock here to fatten upon his wastefulness ! What harm can he see in the nauseating frequency of the talk about what things cost, how much this one and that one has, by men and women, and even children ! Monte Hogs and bullocks, in processions miles wealth? l n g> hurry through his slaughter-houses; his wheat-fields are measured, not by paltry acres but by square miles. He has a net work of thousands of miles of mortgaged railroads ; five thousand millions of francs are invested here, it is said, by Europeans whose eyes have been dazzled by these opportunities, his cities jump from a log- 202 Improvidence cabin to a population of over a million in one short lifetime, a civil war costs him half a million sons or so, and thousands of mill ions of francs; financial panics, anarchist revolutions, a band of Turks in Utah keep ing harems by the grace of divine revela tion, millions of francs stolen from State and city treasuries, these are nothing to him, for in spite of it all he put aside between 1880 and 1890 more than 500,000,000 francs each year. No wonder he thinks that he can never be seriously ill, never be without plenty, and to spare. Economy goes by the name of meanness Economy here. When I see my dollars going as parsimony. though they were francs, when I offer my poor pour-boiresj when I say I cannot afford this or that, when I give my small parting gifts, a book or some other trifle, I feel that these people look upon me with pity, as lean and hungry, and, perhaps, as parsimonious. But our vocabularies are different, as are our measurements and our expectations. Economy is not meanness with us, nor is carefulness deemed parsimony, nor is a competency expected to be wealth, nor is 203 America and the Americans lavishness supposed to be refinement, nor are material possessions mistaken for cult ure, nor fine feathers taken for fine birds. It is all like a dream of fat kine to me, for I have been trained to economy, ob liged to be careful, educated to feel that a gentleman should be master of his pos sessions, not merely paraded about the world upon them, like a monkey riding an elephant in a street-show. Nor am I in the least convinced, on sober second thought, that this country has found an Aladdin s lamp that will never go out. My quiet friend who has childish been so good to me in New York, tells me suspicions 11. and that money used to bring ten per cent. that now it fetches only four or five. He tells me that this decrease in dividends is slowly making itself felt among the masses, and that they do not, or will not, understand that it is a universal economic law which is slowly closing its iron hand on America. He says also that there are signs of revolution about, murmurings of discontent on the part of the poor against the rich, in the air. The poor think, after 204 Improvidence these years of seemingly unending pros perity, that the rich have stolen away the prosperity, and that to attack them is to get it back again. They are even now crying out for more money, more money, as though money could be turned out by machinery at Washington, the national capital ; as though money were anything other than a simple sum in arithmetic, the multiplication of the fruits of the earth by labor. We know that money is only that, but they do not know it here, or will not admit it if they do ! It is little short of comical to hear and to read how these spendthrifts propose to print paper, and to call it money ; or to stamp silver with an American eagle and the name of God, and call it money. Alas ! great wealth has its responsibilities and its lessons, whether the heir be an individual or a nation. Neither as indi viduals nor as a nation have they felt the responsibilities or learnt the lesson here. A Frenchman, an Englishman, or an Aus trian, and even some Russians, feel that they must take care of money ; in the case 205 America and the Americans of very many Americans, at any rate, they feel only one duty toward money, and that is to spend it. French In France there is one savings bank ac- savings. , r , > , r count, averaging over five hundred francs, for every six men, women, and children. The total yearly deposits in these banks is in round numbers 1,000,000,000 francs. ]f we add to these the Postal savings banks as well, there is one account for every four and one half people in all France. Thou sands of people in France look forward to an assured income of 5,000 to 10,000 francs per annum, and even less, as a hap py outcome of years of steady toil. Pray, where is the American, even though his mother was an Irish peasant, or his father a Polish Jew, or a Swedish laborer, whose dream is to have only an income of $1,000 a year ! Contempt This is the heart of the trouble, the competency, root of the discontent here. Their aims are too high, their expectations absurdly out of proportion. They are not satisfied with enough, they want too much, in order that they may waste some of it in the vul- 206 Improvidence garities that are the fashion. By what law, human or divine, these people hope to have, all of them, more, each individual, than the individuals and families of other countries, I cannot understand. They have had more that is readily explained by the opening up of a marvellous country but in time things will right themselves, and a very little fig uring will show the futility of supposing that 75,000,000 of people on one side of the Atlantic are all to have thousands, while a far larger number of people, more indus trious and more economical, on the other side of the Atlantic, are only to have tens and twenties. I thank God that I am not to be here, A hard lesson, that my mother and my sister are not to oe here, when these millions come face to face with the fact that they must learn to be eco nomical, for that is the whole of the prob lem. I foresee a mad war of races, interests, and classes when that time shall come, and sometimes I think it is not so very far off even now. There are 8,000,000 negroes here, there 207 America and the Americans Some are about 1,750,000 people here who can- 1 e not speak English, the foreign-born popu lation numbers over 9,000,000, and the il literates over ten years of age number near ly 6,500,000, aggregating more than one- third of the total population. This occidental nabob is undoubtedly a very vigorous man, but these figures show that he has some tough morsels to digest. If I were he I should take particular care of my health, no matter how well and strong I felt myself to be. 208 XVI L Enfant Terrible NE of the books given me to read before my first visit to America was a story by Mr. * Henry James, entitled, I be lieve, "Daisy Miller." In it is a short account of an American boy, who, among A other things, is made to say : " My pa is boy all-fired rich, you bet ! " I asked another American novelist, well known to all readers of English whom I met in New York, if the American boy was in the habit of making such vulgar speeches. "You are travelling about in America," said he, "take note of the behavior of American children in public and in private, and then tell me what you have decided about them. You come here with a fresh eye. What is indifferent to me is new and notable to you, and when you have been here three months you will know many 209 America and the Americans things that custom has made me too dull to discover." I believe this is true, not only in regard to children, or any other one subject, but to most subjects. The passing stranger falls into many errors, but he hears and sees hundreds of details that the native has grown so accustomed to that they no longer attract his attention. Many men can sleep and eat and work with the din of the city streets in their ears, for they have grown deaf to them. The countryman who comes to the city hears each different noise, and for weeks can neither sleep nor work in comfort. It may well be that I exaggerate the impressions I chronicle here, but, at any rate, they are noises that I actually heard with my ears, and sights that I saw with my own eyes. It is three months and more since I saw my friend, the American novelist, in New York, and when I see him I fancy that there will be a satiric twinkle in his eye when I broach the subject of the American child. I have heard the Henry James incident, not once, but several times. I will give 210 L Enfant Terrible every where. only one example. The boy was perhaps Another twelve or fourteen years old. His parents Miner boy. were, to all appearance, rich. We were sitting on the deck of a steamer, and some remark was made about lifts in private houses. The boy was asked if there was one in his house. " No," was the reply, "but my popper [papa was intended] is rich enough to have one if he wanted to ! " It is needless to give other verbatim re- children, ., . . . , r . children ports of similar speeches from American children ; suffice it to record the fact that this was by no means the only one I heard. Often I stood about and, without appearing to do so, I listened to the conversations of different groups of children this is easy, often unavoidable in America for the children are everywhere en evidence. They are in the railway -trains, in the tram-cars, in the hotel corridors, in the restaurants, at the theatres ; they dine at night at the table (Fhote with their parents, they come down and order their own breakfasts in the hotel restaurant, and in some of the sum mer hotels they are like flies in, on, around, and into, everything. They talk back to, 211 America and the Americans contradict, and disobey their parents in the presence of strangers, and there is no amendment to the Constitution giving them special privileges, simply because they have these without irksome legal formalities. Nor are these poor, or, according to American standards, ill-bred, children of whom I am writing. All the children whose manners and speeches I have noted down, belong to parents who could not pos sibly live as they do with less than an in come of from thirty to sixty thousand francs a year. Hence they are children to whom the best sources of education and companionship are open. Americans, of whatever age, are very prone to tell you what things cost, because about many of the rarer possessions among this world s goods, that is the only accurate knowledge of them they have. But it is unspeakably shocking to hear this continual Money placing of a money value upon everything values. by children " My sled cost so much, my pony, my shoes, my coat, my hat cost so much ! " You hear it like a chorus from children everywhere. They tell one an- 212 L Enfant Terrible other what this, that, and the other posses sion of theirs cost, and they boast of how rich are their respective parents. They are irreverent and independent to a shocking degree. What I have never seen approached for barbaric heartlessness, I saw in New York City, when I actually saw some small boys throwing snowballs at a funeral procession. It was quite needless to ask my novelist friend about American children after this experience. Pliny should have visited America before writing somewhat lugubri ously of the children of his own time and country as follows : " How many are there who will give place to a man out of respect for his age and dignity? They are shrewd men already and know everything; they are in awe of nobody, but take themselves for their own example. Every word of this is true of these American children. It is no wonder that politics are as they are here, if the politicians are to be drawn from these young Saxon Bedouins. It is no wonder that, growing up as they do without discipline and without manners, 213 America and the Americans they cannot play their youthful games when at college against one another without the quarrels and accusations and tu quoques of the prize-ring and the pot-house. Here again we see the theory of inde pendence carried even into the realm of domestic life, and with what dire results. Patria There is no such thing as the patria po- potestas. . . ... , testasj no recognition of authority, even by the children of a household to their natural head. In some of the homes that I visited, it was only too apparent that "home" was merely a fa$on de parler. There was no unity of thought, speech, or action. Each one was a unit, even the youngest, and each had his friends, his opinions, his en gagements, and even his affections, and each one was infallible. The timidity in assert- indiffer- inef even lawful authority, and the con- ence to . authority, tempt for it, which one sees in American politics, is learnt, I firmly believe, in these ill-regulated, or rather these unregulated, homes. Neither the unwritten law of affection of French home-life, nor the unwritten law of 214 L Enfant Terrible allegiance to the head of the family of English home-life, obtains in American home-life. What is erroneously called in dulgence of children by parents is nothing more nor less than neglect of children by parents and here, of parents by their children. In Europe we are prone to think, at least, that the spoiled child is an excep tion, but here the spoiled child is the rule rather than the exception, and a very dis agreeable and inconvenient rule he is, too, to the stranger, though the native has evi dently ceased to notice him. The Ameri can takes the American child, nuisance though he is, as he takes his thieving politicians, his Irish municipal rulers, and his tyrannous trusts and corporations, good-humoredly, and that, at least for the present, is the end of it. He does not bother his head about the future. I have sometimes thought, while travel ling in America, that this almost criminal negligence on every hand about the future, Past and must be in some way related to the fact J that they have no past here. Their con- America and the Americans tinued prosperity for a hundred years has made them careless and thoughtless, and only some awful political or financial catas trophe will bring them to their senses. A rich man can afford to be robbed for awhile, and he can afford to be carelessly lavish and optimistic for awhile, but not forever. This Rich Man of the Western hemisphere must take account of stock some day soon, must realize that the op portunity for vast and rapid accumulations of wealth, is not so frequent nor so easy as it once was, and that his own vigor is declining somewhat ; and when that time comes, this chronicle which is read to-day as perhaps impertinent criticism, will be read then as prophecy. This almost universal feeling about the future, that it will take care of itself, this universal hopefulness, so characteristic of the Americans, make the position of Amer ican children more comprehensible. The The child a Americans are, as a people, political, so cial, and financial rainbow chasers. No matter what the past or the present, they see at the other end of the rainbow pros- 216 L Enfant Terrible parity. The child naturally becomes the symbol of this. The child is all future. He is taken into account in this country, therefore, as a serious and privileged fac- TT . i j ^ , and the tor. He is pushed into prominence in pub- tree. lie, and in private his impertinences are laughed at, and quoted, and he is a shrewd, irreverent, disobedient, and sophisticated mortal before he sheds his knickerbockers. The results do not belie, but support this assertion. The political and domestic dis obedience and selfishness, which end in political misrule and domestic revolt, are more common here than elsewhere. The child is father to the "boss" and the divorcee. Young girls from fifteen to twenty con duct their flippant and passing flirtations unreproved and uninterrupted by parents. " I want Sallie to have the small reception- room to herself this afternoon. Mr. X. is coming to see her, and I want them let alone," was the remark of a well-known Boston lady to the friend in whose house her daughter was staying. The friend in question told me this, telling me at the 217 America and the Americans same time that " Sallie " was only six teen. 1 But who are these people ? " I am asked. "You must have met queer peo ple." On the contrary, this lady and her daugh ters are known to, and received by, Bos ton s most exclusive social world. It has not been my desire to look for, or to illustrate, my chronicle with odd and exceptional instances. If these things ap pear strange or doubtful to Americans, it is simply that they do not notice them. They may be seen by the casual guest in American homes in New York, in Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, and Chicago. It is not that they are rare, these incidents; it is simply that they are of such constant occurrence that the native does not notice them. In a house in New York in which I had the honor to stay for a couple of days, the two children, a boy of eight and a girl of twelve, took me about certain rooms and pointed out to me the various articles, pict ures, and other things that " Pa has prom- 218 L Enfant Terrible ised to leave me when he dies ! " Thus A dead are children early introduced to the serious affairs of life ! Ah ! but in spite of this sophistication, and this laxity of rule in the home, I am told, there is much less immorality here than in France, in Germany, or in England. This statement reveals a curious super ficiality of the American mind. Ameri cans always speak of " immorality " as "immoral* though there were but one kind of immor- ty ality, namely, that related to sex. But are not disobedience, treachery, foul play, po litical and commercial thieving and jock eying, corruption of officials and legislators, bribery, the levying of blackmail are not these also immoral? If the laxity and carelessness in the home do not result in promiscuous social evils, they do lead to disregard of constituted authority to an easy-going disregard of political and com mercial crimes and misdemeanors, un equalled in any other country in the world. There are scores of political thieves and jobbers in New York, who, so it is said, are well known to have made comfortable fort- 219 America and the Americans unes out of the city treasury, and they are not only not shunned, but they are feted and banqueted. So far as I can learn, a man may fail in business, and cheat his creditors almost once a year, and yet no social disgrace or legal penalty prevents his playing the game over and over again. Said a prominent member of the Cham ber of Commerce in New York to me : Puritanism " It is a sad fact that a man well known to andpolitics. . , r . . r-L-i_ be a thief, and a giver and taker of bribes, may be elected to office in this country, while a man known to be absolutely above reproach, so far as financial and political integrity is concerned, may be defeated by any slander touching the purity of his life, even though he be a bachelor." The politicians have played without ceasing upon this absurd and superficial moral code here. A thief is a good man, a man who is suspected even of licentious ness is a bad man. Was there ever a more absurd moral law than that? Either both are good or both are bad. But the Ameri can is nothing if not superficial where ethi cal distinctions are concerned. 220 L Enfant Terrible Then, too, the American is not a sen sualist as a rule, but he does crave wealth and notoriety with a mastering passion no one can measure, who has not seen it in The philos ophy of a. operation on the spot. Hence the sensa tional press of the country revels in high- flown denunciation of all breaches of, or suspicions of, sexual laxity, but passes over, with slight attention, commercial trickery and political corruption, and even ap plauds them at times, if they prove suc cessful. And the children read these dreadful public prints. It is one of their inalien able rights. I have seen scores of them poring over illustrated and spicy accounts of murder, divorce, rape, lynchings, burn ing of negroes for disgusting crimes, and the like. No wonder that at the age of twelve or fourteen they shock a poor, innocent Frenchman of forty-five by their familiarity with the ways of the world. "You can t fool him much," said a fond father of one of these juvenile atroci ties to me in a railway-carriage. " No," I was tempted to reply, "neither can you 221 America and the Americans further corrupt the corrupted nor further debauch the debauched imagination, but that is hardly a matter to be proud of ! " The other But are there no lovely children in the side of the ~ ^ . . i i shield. States ? Are there no young girls who flirt not, no young men who are respectful to their superiors, no politicians who steal not, no merchants of unquestioned integ rity, no mothers who are pure and pious? Let me say at once that there are of all these many. Some of each class I have met. But I am painting a picture for one who cannot see details a picture which is to give only outlines, only the preponder ating colors therefore I make no apologies for what I have written of the American child. Were all the children made into a composite photograph, that photograph would be that of le plus terrible de tons les enfants terrible s. It is written in the Talmud that "Les enfants doivent etre punis d une wain et caresses des deux" That is a wise say- ing, taken as a whole, but a fruitless in junction, if the one hand which punishes is forgotten. 222 XVII "Society" FTER a visit to Boston and Chicago, and a trip to Wash ington and the South, on busi ness affairs, I met my friend again in New York. He robbed himself of part of his own holiday, I fancy, to take me first to Saratoga and then to Newport, and from there I went alone to Bar Har bor, introduced by letters from him and others. Newport is like an enormous and brill- Newport, iant garden in which are palatial homes- We have summer - resorts in and out of France, all over Europe, in fact, but no one place where the wealth and fashion of a nation focus themselves as here. When an American family gets money enough to afford an attack upon the cita del of Society, they begin at Newport. Here congregate what are called " soci- 223 America and the Americans The social kettle. Le mondc oH ton s 1 amuse. ety people," from New York especially, but from Washington, Philadelphia, Bos ton, and Chicago as well, and for two months in the summer the most highly polished American social kettle boils and bubbles and steams upon the Newport hob. Here again one notices how these people love to be close together. Some of the houses are, as I have said, without exaggera tion, palaces, but they are not secluded country-seats ; they are all near together, and one may stroll from one to the other in a few minutes time. A club or casino where they play tennis, where they dance, and dine, and lounge is a meeting-place where, at certain hours in the day, and on certain occasions, people assemble \& flan- ner, to flutter, to flirt, and to gossip. Society in America is not the society of power or even of prestige, but merely the society of intrigue and amusement. I mean, by that, that a man gains nothing of the serious victories of life, victories of com merce, of politics, of literary dignity, by being known as one of the few thousands 224 "Society" or so who give themselves to this side of life. Indeed, both politically and commer cially, I am not sure that he would not lose by being conspicuous in this society. The great game of life used to be, and is still, to some extent, played in the draw ing-rooms in Paris, London, Berlin, Rome, and St. Petersburg. You meet there the diplomats, the politicians, the ecclesiastics, the distinguished or promising men of let ters or of science, the conspicuous jour nalists and soldiers and sailors, the well- known travellers and explorers, and so on. One house represents one shade of politi cal or ecclesiastical thought and action, and another another, and so on. Society is a microcosm of the world. Well intro duced and well mannered, one may see in London, in a fortnight, the men and wom en who are making the wheels of their part of the world go round. At one house you meet one set, at one club another set, and so you may go the rounds. Society there drags the world for its Society s biggest fishes, and you may see the politi- dras net cal dolphin, or the exploring whale, or the 225 America and the Americans literary whitebait, all in white ties and black coats, in a beautiful, big, transparent, bowl which is called society. It is worth while to be a part of this so cial life, and it becomes almost the most interesting portion of a stranger s visit to a strange land. I had a week of Newport, and a fast week, too. I met at least two hundred and more different men and wom en at dinners, dances, picnics, and on board a yacht or two, and I stayed part of my time in one, and part of my time in another, house. The kindness, the hospital ity, the comfort, were lavish. No pleasanter people in the world to enjoy a week with, no kindlier hosts or more attentive hostesses. Your way is made smooth with gold. They even have to a certain extent good ser vants, and, as is true of this class of Ameri cans in all the large cities, the best din ners in the world. The absent But though I have legs and arms and a belly, I have also a head. Where were the statesmen, the soldiers, the men of letters, the men who are making America move, so to speak ? One politician I met, a charm- 226 ones "Society" ing fellow, wealthy and wise, a man who takes his part in New York in State and city affairs, but he was the only one. The great majority of the men were idlers very amiable ones, to be sure but elections are won or lost, "strikes" are suppressed, bridges and railroads are built, treaties with other nations are made, new countries are discovered and settled, Indian riots and negro revolts are subdued, books are writ ten, stocks are sent up or down, laws are made, not only without aid from them, but even without their knowledge. They tell good stories, some of them ; society AM they play games; they dance, dine, and drink ; many of them are mere boys, but they are, so to speak, what the frothed cream on a pudding is to the cow that gives the milk, and Newport might be sub merged in the sea, and the brains and daring and progressive energy of America would not be disturbed in the very least a certain amount of money would be redis tributed et voila tout ! I say this not harshly, but merely to mark a difference. For this same thing 227 America and the Americans could not be said of London, or Paris, or Vienna. The best society of Europe is suc- Le monde cess enjoying an idle hour or so ; the best ou Von . i . . ji . s enMuie. society here is idleness enjoying its suc cess. One may go into society in Europe with a fair expectation of being stimulated, no matter what your own particular inter ests are ; you go into society here and you are fortunate if, for any length of time, you are so much as diverted. In Europe they have had money so long that they are no longer amused by what mere money can do ; here, apparently, society is still content with the juggling and transformations, with the luxury and the surprises, that gold can produce. You do not meet the politicians, but the contributors to the purchase of them ; you do not meet the travellers, journalists, statesmen, colonizers, and warriors, but merely those who talk about them. To that extent, at least, society, so-called, is a distinct disappointment. You hear much about this young woman s family wishing to marry her to that young man whose fortune still has the little card-board tags of 228 "Society" ready-made clothes and carpets upon it. You hear of that married woman s con tinued flirtation with this man, of this, that, and the other menage a trois ; you see, after you hear the stories, and know the names, these small insect-intrigues go ing on under your nose. You say this is no microcosm of this teeming, virile, turbulent American life. Surely not ; it is merely the macrocosm of wealthy frivolity. Society, to be permanently interesting, must be made up of idle professionals, not of professional idlers. Pray, bear in mind that Newport is not what I have dubbed American society ; this is what the Ameri cans themselves say is New York society s best dish, garnished with a little cold Bos- ton celery, and a fringe of Philadelphia and Baltimore parsley. In this connection, clearness demands that one should note the American use of the word society. According to the newspapers, practically every woman who attends a spelling-bee or who goes to the country for a short holiday in the summer is a " society leader." All the young men 229 America and the Americans " Club man. " * Society.* who die in this country are " club-men," or "great club-men," as the case may be. For a long time this puzzled me, till I dis covered that the newspapers intended to flatter, and probably, also, the relicts of the aforesaid deceased young men were actually flattered, by this term, "club-man." In Europe, of course, every man of any posi tion has his club as much as he has his watch or his collar ; and it would be as ab surd to speak of a Paris dandy or of a Lon don swell as a " club-man," as to speak of him as a man of trousers, or clean shirts, or polished boots. Society, in Europe, has a certain re stricted meaning which enables one to pict ure to himself what " in society " means. It is not necessarily a brilliant distinction, but it is, at least, a sufficiently intelligi ble definition. But here "society leader" and "club-man" may mean something or nothing, as the case may be. Here again democracy exaggerates the very sentiments and positions it is supposed to ignore. Every woman with two changes of head gear is a " society woman," and every man 230 " Society" with a top-hat and two pairs of trousers is a "club -man." One hears, too, more talk about "old families" here than any where else ; why it is I know not, unless it be because they secretly feel that they are all so new. An old family means simply a family oid whose members have been, in one capacity or another, noteworthy and valuable citi zens for a century or two ; it means that, or merely that we are all equidistant from Adam, or, at various stages of develop ment, from some anthropoid ape. In short it has a perfectly definite meaning, or it has none. The foreigner is at first bewildered by this " society woman," "club-man," "old- family talk, and then amused by it. There are clubs, and very good clubs, here ; there is society, and very luxurious and bright society ; and there are some noteworthy citizens whose grandfathers were not hanged ; but there are seventy-five million people here also, and some few of them do not come under any of these three heads. When I went to Saratoga, and to Bar 231 America and the Americans Harbor, I kept hearing everywhere of " so ciety women," and " club-men," and " old families," but of society in the restricted and brilliant sense to which we confine the word I saw little outside of New York, Newport, and Washington. Saratoga. Saratoga is famous for its springs of mineral water, and for a certain kind of hotel-life during the summer, such as I have seen nowhere else in the world. Huge wooden structures, containing hun dreds of rooms, are opened during eight or ten weeks in the summer, and there flock thither, to live like bees in a hive, some thousands of people with a certain amount of money to spend. They all eat together, dance together in the hotel par lors in the evening, lounge together on the hotel piazzas during the day, walk to and from the springs together, and if one could see through the partitions between the rooms as well as one can hear through them, the absolute absence of all personal privacy would be attained at last, and the crowd-loving American might look for ward to life hereafter in one of these 232 "Society" Saratoga hotels. It is only, I suppose, a question of time when all partitions will be removed, and the acme of human pro miscuity will be reached when rival hotel- keepers shall advertise " no partitions ! " My stay in Saratoga was short. My friend drove me about one day, spent the night, and then was off to New York. I stayed out another day and night, and followed him to the comparative loneli ness and privacy of the crowded city streets. If Daudet or an equally caustic wit had been with me here, no doubt he would have said that Saratoga explained to him the Destruction of Jerusalem, for the Jews are here in swarms. The negro servants were to me the most African interesting feature of the exhibit. To see one of these negro waiters in a white apron, a tin tray, covered with small bird-seed dishes, poised upon the upraised palm of his right hand, steering his way through the maze of chairs, tables, and other waiters down the long dining-room, was to see a rare sight. But to see the two or three upper-servants snapping their fin- 2 33 America and the Americans gers or moving about pompously, like black kings in an animated wax - work show, was to see the vanity of the peacock surpassed, as is the timidity of the field- mouse by the glories of Solomon. I wonder that the phrase " the glory of a negro head-waiter " has not become a cur rent phrase in the American vocabulary. These black servants, and the dress and ornamentation of the women, made one feel as though one were wandering about in a mammoth aviary, peopled by birds of paradise attended by Africans. Women walk about the streets in the evening in evening dress and glittering with dia monds, and at the dances in the evening unintroduced strangers ask ladies to dance with them. No doubt, morally, everything is right enough ; but this hap-hazard social life, even for a few weeks, must result in producing a dissipated habit of mind and a certain easy looseness of manners, which can hardly be good for either matrons or maids. The One often hears it said in America that kMband. American husbands are the best husbands 234 "Society" in the world, and from the stand -point of women this is quite true. It is a question, however, that only another century of American social and domestic history can answer whether this feminine social and domestic supremacy produces the happiest results. No one will deny that now, in America, the comfort of the man is subor dinated to that of the woman. Unlike most European countries, the men outnumber the women by something over a million and a half. This fact alone gives women a greater value here than elsewhere ; and when one is told that there are over two million widows, or one widow to every fifteen of the female population, this of itself possibly accounts for a certain topsy-turviness of the conjugal relation. What one would expect from this greater freedom and prominence of women holds good, for the divorces number seven pro cured by women to five procured by men. That is to say, of the total male population, 0.15 per cent, were divorced; of the total female population, 0.24 per cent, were di vorced. Now, if it be true, as the Ameri- 235 America and the Americans can women themselves affirm, that the American husband is the best husband in the world, then the above divorce statistics certainly go to prove that there is some thing wrong with the domestic behavior of the American wife. Domestic I offer no comment whatever as to that, because I am, I know very well, prejudiced beyond possibility of fairness in my belief that the man should be master in his house, and that if he is not so considered, it is equally bad for the wife, the children, and the man himself. This hydra-headed monarchy that the Americans are pleased to call a democracy has not succeeded so well thus far that it is a wise move to make family rule hydra- headed as well children, wife, and ser vants all with an equal voice in the man agement, and each with a veto over his per sonal "wills" and "wonts." My own ecclesiastical leanings make it difficult for me to approve of divorce, and yet I hope that I am fair enough to admit that in this country, where the ties of au thority, either ecclesiastical or social, are so 236 "Society" newly knotted, it is not easy to damn any thing off-hand. When, as has been the case, a high dignitary of the church pro cures a divorce for his daughter, and men and women of undoubted decency of life procure divorces, one must know more than do I of such matters, to speak ex cathedra on the subject. One distinguished and affable judge, A e */* ffjf whom I met at dinner, told me that the pianation. American was naturally a domestic animal, and pointed to the large percentage of mar ried people to substantiate his assertion, and followed this by saying that a large percentage of the divorces, he believed, resulted in a more stable and peaceful domestic life thereafter. He believed in permitting no chicanery in the divorce courts, but in permitting divorce for adul tery, for wilful desertion, and certain other offences. 237 XVIII Summer Resorts [N most civilized countries, it has been well said, "Les homines font les lois, les femmes font les mccurs. After a round of New port, Saratoga, and Bar Harbor, one begins to question the truth of this epigram as ap- Anzn- plied to American laws and manners. If applicable . . , . epigram. my observations are ot any worth, the above statement is not altogether true here, where the women make the laws, and the men put up with the manners of the women. Laws and manners, both, are made at Bar Harbor, at any rate, for youngish men by young girls. Picture to yourself a rocky island off the coast of Northeastern America; build for yourself upon it innumerable chateaux, small and large, of fantastic architecture, pour down sunshine upon it, and people it with hundreds of young people in bright- 238 Slimmer Resorts colored summer costumes, and permit these vivacious youths to take all sorts of liber ties with liberty, et voild Bar Harbor. The island was at first an outing-place for New Englanders; it became famous for its unconventional "good times," as they say here, and now it swarms with people from all parts of the States. Land sells for fabu lous sums, the more fashionable world pours in, and dinners, and dances, luncheons, and picnics fill up the days and nights much as at Newport. The class of people here is distinctly different from that at Sara toga, but the ever-present American mix ing process goes on here, only in a different guise here it is al fresco. Young men informai- .- , . ity of inter* and women are off together alone in canoes course. and sail-boats on the water, and in buck- boards and buggies on the land. Women organize entertainments, invite the guests, and generally reign supreme. One of the strangest political phenomena to me is the ceaseless agitation for women s rights here. Rights ! Mon Dieu ! they have rights, privileges, autocracy now in this country ; pray, what more can they want? 2 39 America and the Americans I go to a luncheon, and thereafter I am escorted to a canoe by a maiden of twenty - odd summers, who keeps me out on the water with her till eight o clock, laughs merrily when, in trepidation, I wonder what excuses I am to make to my dinner- hostess that evening. " Oh, tell her you were with me ! " I dine at the chateau of a Chicago lady, whose husband is not in evidence. He is deplorably vulgar, they tell me ; but the wife is an energetic leader socially, and in Claudius? other ways Ubi Claudius ibi Claudia is the usual form, is it not ? But here ubi Claudia and Claudius nowhere, seems to be the rule. In Europe the wife takes the so cial position of her husband, but here, God bless you ! the husband merely fits in to the social exigencies of his wife as best he can. I am having, as these young Americans say, "a. simply lovely time," but, to be honest with you, I do not half like this new basis of social life. I do not see that it leads to anything strong, and true, and vigorous in the national life. Among the lower animals the lion has 240 Summer Resorts the mane, and the lioness is less noticeable than he; the male pheasant carries the gorgeous plumage, and his mate looks som bre beside him ; the male Indian, both in A newdis the East and West, wears the jewels and the gorgeous robes and blankets; but in this last type of civilization the females strut and preen themselves in iridescent colors and in costly finery, and the male limps sedately behind her. The women drive, the women paddle and row and sail, the women invite you, the women entertain you. These women are never crossed, never made to obey, except when they have daughters of eighteen and over, and then these overwise young misses make a league with the down-trodden fa ther, and the mother goes to the wall. I hope that I am not exaggerating. I speak only of what I see with my own eyes. I give only the preponderating colors of the scene. There are exceptions. Pray, think not that I am such a prig as to give these fleeting glances as profound observa tions, as data not to be denied or modified, n spite of all that I write, it is only here, 241 America and the Americans not in prudish England, not in lethargic Germany, not in decorous and sleepy Hol land, that I learned the falsity of my coun tryman s cynical dictum : " // est de bons manages ; il n en est pas de delicieux" I have seen in various parts of the world married people who respected one another, married people who loved one another, but A big word here I have met at least a dozen married of praise. > r ^ people of some years standing who actually enjoy one another. After all that I have said which would seem to contradict this, I can only explain these manages delicieux by referring them to the large category of bewildering surprises which this land sup plies to the studious spectator. It ought to be the case, that this untram melled freedom of married and unmarried women should produce a good fellowship not to be found in countries where women are more carefully guarded ; and where the women are of the best type here, this turns out to be the case. For most women the system is bad, but for a picked few it re sults in the happiest domestic establish ments in the world. 242 Summer Resorts Nothing is more productive of slavery than the gift of liberty. To give a man or woman liberty that he or she has not earned is merely to put him or her in worse bondage than before. One sees this here in the case of the negroes, in the case Fatal of the Irish politicians, in the case of the ltbt socialistic and anarchistic immigrants, who, severally and together, take the most im pertinent liberties with liberty. I beg pardon in advance, but I permit myself to say that this applies as well to many of the women, and to almost all the children. One cannot conceive of an English Bar Harbor, of a French Saratoga, of an Aus trian Manhattan Beach. People are not deemed fit for such freedom in those coun tries ; and taking the results all together, massing them, so to phrase it, and leav ing out the delicious exceptions, I doubt whether the Americans are worthy of such freedom. I saw at Saratoga and at Bar Harbor various things that led me to be lieve that many men and women overlook the difference between liberty and liberties. A slave to whom a crown is given, all too 243 America and the Americans often becomes a tyrant. Let the baby do as it pleases for a week, and see the natural instincts of humanity to wear the crown and wield the sceptre of an autocrat, crop out. This is the land of spoiled children, and had I not come to know well here some such splendid types of what a woman should be, I should add, of spoiled women, as well. Perhaps it is true that the best types of men and women are more quick ly developed and improved by those rarest gifts wealth, power, liberty. These A danger things are good for the best, but they are certainly bad for the average run of people, and an impartial view of this civilization proves the truth of this. Certainly, had I a young wife and daughters, I should not turn them out for the summer at Sa ratoga or Bar Harbor unless I were an American husband, in which case I should do as I was bid and pay the bills ! It must not be supposed, from this social and domestic prominence of the women here, that the men are a supine lot. They are subordinate to their women, but not 244 Slimmer Resorts easily bullied by other men. They are not effeminate ; it is simply the habit of the country. As in the far West, the In dian warrior of undoubted bravery, whose tepee is hung with scalps, may be beaten by his favorite squaw without loss of dig nity or impeachment of his courage ; so here, among the more civilized pale-faces, the men make no point of ruling in matters domestic. Whoever has seen Hyde Park of a Sun day morning after church, or watched the crowds on their way to the races in Paris of a Sunday afternoon, knows without the telling that the men are as much aux petits Dress of the soins about their toilet as the women. It is not so here. In New York, at Newport, in Washington, one meets many men who are always carefully groomed. But the average male American is almost sloven ly in his dress, and the farther West you go the more this is apparent. A man, in many parts of the country, who is punc tilious in his dress is looked at rather askance as one who devotes too much time and thought to the rather feminine details 245 America and the Americans of existence. This is carried to such an extent that many gentlemen even do not look fresh and neat. In some parts of the country men pan der to this for political effect, and wear shabby clothes, hats, and boots, and no neck-cloth sometimes no collar in the belief that this slovenliness endears them to the vote-holding masses. Many mem bers of Congress have no evening clothes, and deem it foppery to wear such. One federal Senator was said never to wear Politics and socks ; another always wore a paper collar, fastened at the throat by a diamond button, but no neck-cloth ; and I could cite many more examples of similar savagery. Much of that, of course, is hypocrisy pur et simple, mere ochlocraticism. In the case of the many carelessly dressed men in both the East and West, the matter is explained by the very high price of clothes when made by a tailor, and not bought ready-made, and to the fact that the servants are not trained here to look after one s wardrobe. In theory, this sounds all very democratic, to be one s 246 Summer Resorts own valet, to look after one s own clothes and boots. I stayed in one house in Chicago, by the way, where a small box was pointed out to me as containing black ing and brushes, and with my own right hand, did I burnish up my boots but as a matter of fact it is neither democratic nor economical. Subdivision and syste- matization of labor is the only true democ ratic, the only true economic, way. At a club in Chicago, chatting of Ameri can affairs with an entertaining American, I broached the subject of prices. Like most Americans he launched out into a descrip tion of his own affairs. The suit of clothes he had on cost, he said, two hundred and seventy - five francs. He calculated that he spent about nineteen hundred francs a year just for coats, trousers, and waistcoats. His tailor, he said, would not make him an A Chicago evening suit for less than four hundred and fifty francs. It was in the morning that we were chatting, and I was wearing a suit that I had had three years, and which cost me originally eighty-five francs. But then 247 America and the Americans good Francois keeps my clothes and boots as I keep my guns. Things for the differ ent seasons are put away, and brought out again, and though I have probably five suits of clothes to that young gentleman s one, my clothes and Francois s wages added do not cost me per annum anything like the amount he spends for his. For a young man to have a man-servant in this country is to be marked out as pe culiarly foppish, as rather silly, as some what effeminate. But fancy the lost time, the lost energy, the worry of a really busy man who should attempt to be his own bootblack, to fold and brush and look after his own clothes, and calculate how much money he must waste through the lack of care bestowed on these things. Personally I can see nothing derogatory personal to one s character in being another man s servant, if the other man is a good fellow. I supposed that in a democracy, at any rate, service was the only genuine badge of nobility. I should have enjoyed being valet to Alexander the Great, or Louis Quatorze, or groom of the chambers to 248 St-rvice. Summer Resorts Lorenzo the Magnificent, or secretary to Talleyrand or Moliere. What more inter esting task than to serve a man who is Effete pku- playing a worthy part in the affairs of life? osopky If one cannot do great things one s self, what can be nearer to it than to help take care of the man who can ? It is this absurd and wholly undemo cratic feeling about service in America which makes all the details of domestic and social, and even commercial and polit ical life, so rough and hard and tiresome. It is one thing to be a slave, quite another to be a servant. In every civilized State the servants of God are given precedence, and, pray, who should come next in a Chris tian democracy, if not the servants of man, and then the servants of men ? The savage kills his own game, makes his own blanket, and bows, and arrows, and tent, each for himself. The civilized man has found it more simple to apportion to each a task, and thus leave each one free econom y- to devote his whole time to the doing of one thing well. In this way life is made more simple, less complex, and, in the true sense, 249 America and the Americans more democratic. Who would counsel re verting to the system of each man his own cook, his own policeman, his own builder, his own tailor, his own shoemaker ? There is no office in this needful world But dignifies the doer, if done well," writes Fortunatus the Pessimist. These Americans handicap themselves heavily by this semi -savage idea of theirs about service. Given six men, one who kills, one who cooks, one who builds, one who farms, one who makes clothes, one who makes shoes; and on the other hand six communities of one man each, where each one attempts to do all these duties himself, and who doubts which of these seven com munities will be most prosperous and most powerful at the end of a year ? A statesman who looks upon statecraft The f as a serious business, and we Frenchmen sidecfit. know whether it is a serious business or not, has no time to chop up his own fire wood, and to sew buttons on his own shirt, and to black his own boots. In many matters American men have kept pace with 250 Summer Resorts the marvellous material progress of their own country, but in this matter of the sys- tematization of the minor details of life they are leagues behind us, leagues behind Germany and England formidable com mercial competitors of theirs leagues be hind Japan,- even. They are far too self-confident to take any warning now. They deem these, matters that will right themselves, or problems that they will solve by machinery. But India, Russia, and South America grow wheat now, and borrow the best American ma chines for their labor ! Democracies have usually failed because Weakness . , , . of detnocra- they would not give their best men a chance, des. because they would not put confidence in natural leaders. Nothing the people dis trust so much as the people. America has this lesson to learn. Another hundred years and they will be put to it here, despite their great natural advantages, to keep their place among the great nations. Only men, strong men, trained men, trusted men, can fight their battle for them. Machines will not do it. Luck will not do it. Only 251 America and the Americans trained men served by trained servants will do it. But allons done ! I am preaching, nous verrons ce que nous verrons ! But I like these brave people too much not to be serious in my discussion of their affairs from time to time. I fear that perhaps Bar Harbor and Saratoga and Newport made me feel a lit tle school - mastery toward them, made me think they were not studious enough. I may be mistaken. There may be other A possi- surprises in store for me. Perhaps some bility. . , L . American even now has an invention up his sleeve by means of which a man may carry a machine in his watch-case which will valet him and secretary him, and board and lodge him, all by touching a spring. 252 XIX Impressions of Chicago HAD about finished putting my journal in order to send it to my friend in New York, when I received, forwarded by him to my address, an extraordinary letter from Chicago. The letter ran about as follows: "My dear Monsieur X. : You will remember that A we met in Chicago. My friend Y. , of New York, tells me that you have consented to put some of your notes, taken while in America, in his hands for printing. If you say anything about the Windy City, you might mention my name, as you fel lows say, just en passant!" Then there were several pages of personal flattery, and an offer to send me any facts I might want concerning the writer himself in particular, and about society in general in Chicago. This young gentleman surely deserves that 253 America and the Americans I give his name here, but too many Ameri cans have been kind to me to permit of my indulging malice toward even one of them knowingly. I had not intended to describe Chicago, or Detroit, or Kansas City at any great length, though I paid short visits to all three. A casual tour about Chicago, with a Chi cago gentleman and his wife, left a vague impression of slaughter - houses, cemete ries, parks, and lake-front. I was much im pressed, too, by the strange combination of Pork and Plato there. My hostess attended twice a week a Plato club, and the winter be fore, so she told me, she had attended a sim ilar class in Browning. Her husband, on the other hand, took me to see, as possibly the most interesting sight in the city, the Pork. slaughter-houses and stock-yards. I wit nessed a procession of pigs becoming sau sages at the rate of I have forgotten how many a minute. He laughed at her Plato, she laughed at his pigs. It seemed to me that the one was taken no more seriously than the other. One-fifth of the total population of Illi- 254 Impressions of Chicago nois is made up of Germans and Irish, and in Chicago itself more than two-thirds of the population is foreign-born. This state of things would seem to offer ample food for study and reflection to the more serious- minded citizens. With a self-proclaimed anarchist as Gov ernor of their State, and riots in Chicago only lately that required the federal troops to suppress them, one would imagine that the study of Plato and Browning, and the net-work of clubs for which the city is notorious, for investigating kindergarten methods, for promoting the rights of wom en, for the study of pre-Raphaelite art, for the study of the history of Fiction, for col lecting funds for excavations in Greece, for the study of the pre-Shakespearian drama tists, and many more topics equally unre lated to the real problems of the city, were not to the point. Be it said, to my shame, that never be- if Plato fo-, . , came to re at a dinner have I conversed with a Chicago! lady on the subject of Plato. I believe Plato kept but a meagre place in his re public for women. It would, no doubt, 2 55 America and tbe Americans surprise him, as much as it surprised me, to visit this city, the name of which hitherto had been made familiar to me by seeing it on tins of meat, to find himself served up with the soup at his first dinner-party. One charm, at least, about the intel lectual life in America is its unexpected ness. People here in Chicago are not trammelled by centuries of training and precedent. We Europeans begin with the alphabet, go on to simple words of one syllable, then on from primer to reader, and begin our national classics with La Fontaine, and so on through a regularly graded intellectual training, step by step. But here in Chicago a lady, who talked glibly of Plato, surprised me by saying that she did not know an English poet named Peacock, and thought I was jok ing when I told her that his full name was Thomas Love Peacock. A prophet The only sustained bit of English prose not without , , r / -, 1 . , honour. that has come out of Chicago, so my novel ist friend told me, is a little book, half fic tion, half reminiscence, of Italian life. I asked this same lady, therefore, if she had 256 Impressions of Chicago read "The Chevalier of Pensieri-Vani," and she had never heard of the book. Here is another illustration alas ! that there are so many of the superficial, short-and-easy methods here. Culture ! Yes, culture is the word they use. I know men and women in France, in Russia, in Italy, who speak and read half a dozen languages, who have travelled over all Europe and much of the East, who know and have learned much from distin- Culture guished people all over the world, who have gone through the hard continental school and university training, and who do not dream that anyone thinks them men and women of pre-eminent culture. But here, God bless you ! these women who only just know how to write their notes of invitation and their letters prop erly, talk of culture ! It reminds me ot Boston, of Concord again, and of Plym outh, where, as here, the side-issues of life, the fringe, the beads, the ornaments of the intellectual life are worn tricked out on the cheap and shabby stuff of an utterly in adequate preliminary mental drill. 257 America and the Americans One young man I met here, a professoi in the university, who turned out to be a One scholar distinguished Greek scholar and the editor fit Icust, of an erudite book on the American Con stitution. I confided to him my impres sions of the superficiality of much of this learning and reading and studying by short- and-easy methods, but he was too much the gentle scholar himself to chide others, though I learnt later that he has written of this flimsy pretentiousness of the intel lectual life in unmeasured terms. All this study and reading are not bad ; it is the choice of subjects and the assumption that when one has a little superficial knowledge of the great classics, one is therefore an equal of those who have endured the driU and training of years of academic life, which is mischievous. These are a young people in a hurry, and they often mistake haste for swiftness. There is an intellectual ocean of difference between knowing things, and knowing about them. The chief value of knowledge is the training gained in its pursuit. The Chicago method consists in a kind of con- 258 impressions of Chicago viction of knowledge, akin to the mys tic s conviction of righteousness, or the Calvinist s conviction of sin, and they are all three equally harmless and equally useless. Chicago is the metropolis of the great middle West, an enormous territory of vast promise, and is now a city of a million inhabitants. As a witty gentle man in New York said to me, they have Pursean ..,.,, . . T i sow s ear. municipalized the prairies. It is a rough and raw civilization, and it is a fatal blun der to attempt to put fine French fur niture-polish on rough boards before they have been planed and smoothed to receive it. It is said by anthropological- students who have investigated the subject that certain barbarous races are weakened and finally exterminated by civilization. It is said, too, that minds accustomed to train ing and to study can bear training as minds of less cultured ancestry cannot. Some times I think that the enormous increase of wealth, of opportunity, of luxury, in such a community, say, as Chicago, have for the 2 59 America and the Americans moment weakened that fortunate growth of the men and women to whom they have come in the largest proportion. For reasons unnecessary to mention here, I was obliged to spend a day and two nights some hundreds of miles from Chi cago, in a rough little village. I met there the genuine unwashed, unabashed, un- Tke un- affected American in all his glory. At a American, certain so-called "grocery-store," whither I went in the evening to find a notary, I spent some two hours. During those two hours I heard some of the shrewdest talk I had heard during my entire stay in America. These were types of what the politicians call " the plain people." I began to think that the politicians were right. I forgot Newport, I forgot Semitic Saratoga, I for- A ray o/ got Miss U. S. Liberty, embarrassing the finical foreigner at Bar Harbor, and I began to see the real backbone of this strange American life. I felt quite sure, when I left that expectorating group of natives sitting about the stove in that gro cery-store, that no politician, no theorist, 260 Impressions of Chicago no socialist, would deceive those men for any great length of time. I had a similar experience, that I have not noted here, both in Salem and in New Bedford, towns in Massachusetts, and I remember now that I was much im pressed then with the same shrewdness, and the same rugged integrity of manner and speech there. Such men as these are much superior to relatively the same class in France, in Eng land, or in Italy. So far as education is Rough concerned, their speech and their allusions showed that they had little academic train ing ; but they thought for themselves, and, what is better and more profitable, acted for themselves, and this had evidently given them an independence and sturdiness that will not be easily shaken. I did my business in one case with a man who handled his pen much as a wom an handles a gun, but who needed no law yer at his side to protect him. He knew all about his own business, and a good deal besides, which it had been well for me had I known, too. 261 America and the Americans They tell me that the West is peopled with just such men that the same is true The f lain of New England and the Middle States. They give little heed to passing discussions and fleeting theories, but when the real rub comes they appear at the front in start ling numbers, with muskets or votes, as occasion requires. I by no means wish to imply that they are always right, but they are always in earnest ; and when one has devoted much of his time to the gayer side of American life, this background of ear nestness appeals to one as all the more im portant, and as a factor in this nation not to be overlooked. If I were pioneering a party of foreign capitalists through this country, hoping to persuade them to leave their money here, I might take them to Newport, and perhaps to Boston, just to hear English properly spoken ; but I should certainly take them to the seaboard towns of Massachusetts and Maine, and to the rough villages of the Western States, to let them see the real quality of the great bulk of the American people. 262 impressions of Chicago As for me, when I returned to Chicago from my visit to the prairies, it seemed to me that there was more chance for Chicago Hope for than I had thought, when I first saw that Chicag in this socialistic foreign population many of the people I met were pretending to be serious about Browning, Plato, and the pre-Raphaelite poets. Somehow dilettanteism in Chicago seems out of place. It is a little too much as though the coachman should turn round on the box to tell you what Ruskin says about sunsets, or the laundress turn from the tub to chat about the chemistry of soap- bubbles. Not that a coachman may not enjoy a sunset, and a laundress wonder about the iridescence of a soap-bubble, but for the time being their thoughts should be of other things. Pork, not Plato, has made Chicago, and Chicago people have not arrived at a stage of civilization yet where they can with propriety or advantage change their alle giance. One other feature of American life at tracted my attention first in Chicago, 263 America and the Americans though I found that it was common in the clubs in all parts of America. We were sitting, some half a dozen of us, in the club, when another member appeared on the scene. He called a ser- vant, said to him, " Take the orders ! " and potabmty. then turning to us all, said: " What 11 ye have, gentlemen ? Thus this young man had his one drink, with his bill multiplied by six or seven. This practice is almost universal. It is done in New York as it is done here, and at Kansas City, and everywhere else I have been. "Take the orders ! " and " What 11 ye have? " might well be emblazoned on the club-crests like Ich dicn, " or " Non sans droict. They illustrate the hospitable tendency of the people, and the everywhere-prevailing dis like of solitariness. It is of no consequence on these oc casions that the inviter is not acquainted with the invitees. He includes them all in his generous embrace. He invites you to partake cf potables first, and makes your acquaintance afterward. This custom leads to an unnecessary multiplication of pota- 264 Impressions of Chicago lions, perhaps, but is an easy and gracious way of introducing one s self, or of re-intro ducing one s self to new-found company. This cheerful, all-embracing "What ll ye have?" sounds in my ears now, when I am so many thousand miles away, and I smile involuntarily as I think of the hap py-go-lucky, prosperous, and genial young heirs of a mighty nation s wealth, to all of whom I would gladly say, as so many of them have said to me : " What 11 ye have ? " I did not get as far as the Pacific coast, and my journeys in this Western country were hastened by an unexpected order to return to Paris. But I am not sure that the communities in America with the least assumption of polish are not, after all, the most interesting, at any rate, to the Euro pean. There is a great difference between newness and freshness. The East seems a Newness bit new, but the West is still fresh. The a n n e f/ re one has the awkwardness of the novus homo, the other the awkwardness of a sturdy but growing school-boy. The mistakes of the West are blunders of exuberance, the mis takes of the East are the blunders of self- 265 America and the Americans repression. The one does not care at all, the other cares too much. The Western cow-boy and the Western farmer seemed to me to be rather more genuine, as articles of American manufact ure, than the haw-hawing Bostonian, or the New Yorker with his men-servants in knee-breeches. But here again I beg to apologize for generalizations. I know too many dandies whose minds and muscles are not what their neck-cloths and boots and gloves would seem to proclaim, to The cow- make off-hand comparisons between the p and h thc " cow-puncher " and the " dude," as they call them here. During the late war between the North and the South, they tell me, the colleges sent as fair a proportion of good fighters as the lumber-camps; and the shops of New York and Boston as worthy representatives as the farms and the prairies. I am writing you of what I saw, of my personal impres sions. An instantaneous photograph of a nation is no more a history or a prophecy than the photograph of an individual is an analysis of his character. 266 XX American Newspapers a greater extent than in any other country, the newspapers of America are read and talked about. Some of the most en tertaining Americans one meets, or hears of, are journalists. It would be impossi ble to leave the country, after studying its journals as have I, without a few words concerning them. One hears so much, and so often, of what education has done, and will do, for the masses in America, that one comes at last to ask himself, in just what, then, is this so-often-vaunted education to consist ? First of all, the Americans refer you to their public schools. But even the best schools do not give a man an education, much less can these schools do so. Experience, read ing, travel, intercourse with other men, and 267 America and the Americans education. daily employment of one s faculties, these are what educate a man, after the schools have given him the more mechanical in struments of education. The Americans are such voracious readers of their own newspapers, that the Newspaper newspapers must be taken into account as an important not to say the chief factor in what may be termed the secondary education of the mass of the people. Last year 340,000 immigrants arrived in America ; 270,000 of them were over four teen years of age, and of these last, 78,000 could neither read nor write. The first printed matter that these people will read, when they can read at all, will be the newspapers. What they, and many, very many, other Americans read almost exclu sively are the newspapers. To a republican like me, interested to see what this greatest of republics is to become, the newspapers were a constant source of study, and, I may add, of amaze ment. A newspaper to a Frenchman is, first of all, a literary production, well- planned and properly balanced, and with 268 A French newspaper American Newspapers that as an instrument, it gives the news, and comments thereon. Many American newspapers have no such aim. Most of them read as though they had no editor, and were the result of shovelling contributions into a hat, with out a head in it, to be taken out and printed in such order and sequence as chance may dictate. There are, of course, exceptions to this. One prominent daily A firstrate newspaper, published every morning in New York, which shall be nameless, is edited, edited in fact better than any other sheet of the kind in the country, and as one glances over it, the logical mind is satisfied with its evident sense of propor tion, and its terse expressions and clear Eng lish. Whether one admires its tone always or not, there is daily evidence that there are brains in the editorial rooms, while many other newspapers give evidence only of a plentiful supply of mud in those quarters. It would be a colossal task to enumerate and to criticise, with any care, even the leading American newspapers. Instead of that, and out of regard to the dangers of 269 America and the Americans prejudice and partiality, I have chosen eight newspapers from different parts of the country, and carefully summarized their contents. The majority of these newspapers have from six to eight columns on a page, and the columns are from seventeen to twenty- one inches in length. A newspaper with twelve pages of seven columns each, and each column twenty inches in length, would have about 1,680 inches of printed matter. With a measuring-tape I mapped out these eight newspapers, with the results as shown A synopsis, in the table. The synopsis of the matter is, of necessity, very general, and no doubt here and there mistakes were made in putting such and such matter under this or the other heading. Wherever there was any doubt in my own mind as to whether a topic came under the head of news or gossip, to the newspaper was given the benefit of the doubt, so that if there are errors they are in favor of the newspaper. In choosing the three New York papers for this table I was guided by an eminent law yer of New York, who gave me what he 270 vo Q M O vO t- txoo H M inoo ro * ro M lovo * M 10 mvo r^ w M w m H <ovo OOi-iO-4- t^ ^- lO^O WVC Nmro C^dHM WOO MU-> OOO * tx t>. v> M " v> t^OO Mtx-jO^J-Tj- H i?^ 2 H 1 S ^2 : :fi 1 -2 s 3 S - J3 I II s s S ci ^ I hund e of t 271 America and the Americans considered one good, one bad, and one in different, example, my own choice being subordinated to his. In adding the Paris Figaro to the list, I offer a comparison of orderliness, economy, and succinctness, as we know them in France. A Parisian likes his newspaper to read it self as he turns its pages; the American is willing to delve, and seek, and flounder, in order to get the little that one really cares to know from day to day. The news paper is primarily to make and to keep a man at home in the world, with as little cost of time and labor, as may be, to himself. The average American newspaper has no such aim in view. It flounders about in Lack of crime, gossip, accidents, sensations, per- precision. ... ~ . . sonalities, fiction, pictures, and news, ap parently unable to decide just what it wants to do. One of the eight newspapers, on the particular day on which I tabulated its contents for this purpose, devoted almost one-twelfth of its total contents to the weather ; another gave considerably more than one-half of its total contents to crime, advertisements, sport, and personal gossip ; 272 American Newspapers another gave one-half of its columns to ad vertisements ; another was all too evidently wavering between the sensationalism of one extreme, and the decency and orderliness of its evening contemporary in the same city. In all but one of them, practically every thing was padded to a grotesque extent, with the evident intention of giving their readers the impression of a wealth of news for their money. The newspapers included in this table were chosen quite at random so far as date is concerned, and no attempt was made to point a moral or to adorn a tale, by choosing an issue of any one of them which should illustrate any particular point. There they are, just as they might appear on any given day to a stranger looking them over at an hotel or a club, The first thing one notices about them is their utter disregard of proportion as compared with the Figaro, for example. It is surely impossible that on any given day in New York, accidents, crime, fire, and business failures should be, omitting the advertisements, one-third of all the 273 America and the Americans news and comment, as appeared to be the case according to one of these newspapers ; or that the weather could possibly offer such a fund for comment as to swallow up one twentieth of a large morning paper ; or that society in Chicago should suddenly be come, in point of interest, one-twentieth of all the known world reached by telegraph. Were I to make these statements off book, the critic would appear, as is so often the case, with his " foreign exaggeration," "absurd generalizations from rare inci dents," and so on, but, fortunately, the table is here, and from it each one may de duce his own conclusions. My own con clusion is that unless one happens upon such newspapers as the Post, the Sun, the Tribune, in New York, for example, he would be led to believe that the population consisted of thugs, fire-bugs, and bankrupts, who, for some unaccountable reason, spent large sums on advertising. Here again we touch upon that peculiar A sa ient American trait of itching to be busy, coupled with a disinclination to think hard about anything. Far too much is 274 American Newspapers done, far too little is thought out. The newspapers mirror accurately enough, most of them, this state of mind. One can al most see the editor of one of these news papers " fearfully busy," with no time to think the last thing he cares to do, or is capable of doing probably surrounded by telephones, type-writers, office-bells, and stenographers, fearful lest a rival should get a murder, a fire, a prize-fight, or a personal scandal that he wants; padding news that he promptly contradicts the "Bein next day, and pouring forth irrelevant, again. inaccurate, and unwholesome printed mat ter upon a constituency of readers whom he has taught to be sceptical, frivolous, and eager for another sensation. Ruin stares him in the face if his readers are allowed to think or to study, and he does every thing in his power to so occupy their minds that they may do neither. It is sometimes said, by the ignorant, that the Catholic Church aims to keep its peo ple in ignorance that thus they may be the more readily ruled. This is certainly and obviously true of certain newspapers of 275 America and the Americans large circulation in America. Their pub lic must necessarily be people of un trained minds, and thus they are doing an awful injury to the State in retarding the development of that only possible safeguard of a republic an educated suf frage. It would be as impossible to a university- trained man to read continuously certain of these newspapers, as to interest himself at leisure moments, with his baby s blocks or nursery rhymes. And yet to a large extent the better class of people must help to support these newspapers, since, as a rule, they are the moneyed class. They who buy* advertise in them, and to some extent sub scribe for them ; for the mere buying of a newspaper for a penny, by even an enor mous number of people, will not make its proprietors very rich. I would not dare, as an outsider, to set down here the contemptuous things that are said about the worst of these news papers and their proprietors by practically every respectable American one meets. But good -humor and carelessness prevail in the 276 American Newspapers end, and no one cares to take the step be yond denunciation. Trained, travelled, and capable men are not so numerous in America as in France, England, and Germany. Those who have these qualifications are either making money in other affairs, or they are a small number of them idlers, what the newspapers call "club-men!" It was well known in Europe that Lord Salisbury, now England s Prime Minister, contribu ted regularly in years gone by to the Sat urday Review, anonymously of course. Should he have presented himself to an American editor as a candidate for his staff, not one in ten of them would have An known enough to make any use of him, unless it were to advertise the fact that " Salisbury now hangs up his coronet and his peer s robes on the back of our office- door ! " Many of these Fire-Failure-Prize fight newspapers do not want, and have no place for, such articles as the man who was to become England s Prime Minister could write. They do not want men who can stop and think, they want men who 277 America and the Americans can run and jump ; and the dirtier the pud dle they land in, the better. Such a man as M. de Pressense, or such an one as Sir Charles Dilke, one of the greatest living authorities on extra-Eng land subjects, might wait in vain for a place on the staff of an American newspaper. The American editor wants something that will sell to-morrow morning, and not something that will be true to-morrow, and for a year of to-morrows. The large majority of Americans do not know good English from bad though they have a keen appreciation of smart writing hence a trained and clever craftsman with the pen is of no more value than the average re porter, and would probably cost more. The fact that domestic politics is man aged and directed, not by the people, but by professional politicians, makes it un necessary futile when they do for the mass of the people to learn even about their own political questions from their news papers. So far as foreign politics are con cerned, the mass of Americans take little interest in them, and give little heed to 278 American Newspapers what is written on such subjects. Hence the newspapers are not looked to for teach ing of a direct and valuable kind, as they are in other countries. "What is going on," is a familiar head ing in many newspapers, and to tell this luridly or decently, and no matter how in accurately, is the sole aim of many of them. In an empire or a monarchy it is not, per haps, necessary that the people should be students, but in a republic it is the prime necessity. To study and to learn requires training, and you cannot train on absinthe or cocktails. The lower-class newspapers accustom the people to such highly seasoned fare that the plain diet of honest thought becomes dis- Da tasteful to them. These newspapers, there- dtet fore, are themselves not only not teaching anything good, but they are making it more and more difficult for anyone else to do any teaching that shall be of practical value. The repeated failure to make a weekly paper, say like the London Spectator, a success here, and the difficulty of making even a sound daily newspaper a paying 279 America and the Americans venture, bear witness to the debauchery of the reading public by the sensational press. On the other hand, the Americans have an illustrated weekly paper, called, I be lieve, Harper s Weekly, which is far supe rior to anything of the kind in Europe, and their beautifully illustrated monthly mag- Firstrate azines have no rivals even, anywhere in the world. These, however, do not depend for their popularity upon any one city, or upon any one section of the country, but are subscribed for, and read, by the better classes all over the country. In this con nection it is fair to say, too, that my own favorable conclusions in regard to such newspapers as the Sun, the Post, and the Tribune, in New York, and others else where, are but echoes of the respectable opinion there. I plume myself, not upon having made any journalistic discoveries, but upon hav ing used a European measure upon Amer ican newspapers, only to find that its records tally with what Americans, who are best able to judge, say themselves . Nothing is more difficult for a traveller 280 American Newspapers than to say what is good, and what is evil, in a stranger nation. But, the world over, it is believed, to put the matter broadly, that courage is virtue, and cowardice is vice. Trace back the pedigree of any virtue, and its first ancestor was courage. Trace back the pedigree of any vice, and The ethics its first ancestor was cowardice. Then we must all admit Frenchmen, Americans, Englishmen, and Italians, alike that stab bing men and women in the back ; hurl ing anonymous insults at them one West ern newspaper calls the President of the United States a wife-beater publishing persistently misleading news \ prying into the private affairs of private families ; pub lishing stolen photographs of women and children ; listening to, and circulating, character-destroying stories without troub ling to investigate or to hear the other side; devoting a responsible position to the exploitation of crime, scandal, and un verified rumors is cowardly, and, therefore, unworthy of a gentleman. If American newspapers are in the habit of doing any or all of these things, we can 281 America and the Americans all agree that they are bad, without going into ethical details, that lend themselves to discussion and argument. That some of these newspapers, and their proprietors and editors, do devote themselves to the print ing of such matter, no one here denies. The strange code of morals of these peo ple is thus brought more than ever into prominence. You may sit at dinner near a man who, a few hours before, saw the proof of an article reciting the nasty de tails of a social scandal, and who ordered it printed ; while if this same man told the same story at his club, steps would be taken to bring about his resignation. The far ther you travel into the interior, the more the people look upon their newspapers as privileged social and moral Juggernaut cars, to which there is nothing to do but to kneel for crushing. They are an ingenious people, these Americans. It will not be long before A sugges- there is an American Association for Pro tection against the Newspapers. Members of the association will pay so much each year, and the association will undertake in return, 282 American Newspapers with eminent lawyers for counsel and large wealth behind it, to protect its members from anonymous attack of a malicious or meddlesome kind. Then will cease that most incomprehensible and vulgar feature of American life, to the stranger, namely, the daily publication of private and per sonal details of home and social life. No doubt many Americans love to see their names in print, but they are usually those who deserve no such attention, and as for those who do not, life is sometimes made intolerable for them. Even from the low commercial stand- A comme point, it is estimated that many millions of the much-striven-for dollars are now ex pended in Europe by Americans, who frankly tell you that they have been hounded out of the country by the news papers. They have committed no graver fault than to be the possessors of large wealth, but the newspapers made privacy impossible to them, their children, or even their servants, and what money could not buy here, they have gone to Europe to buy in peace there. 283 America and the Americans Surely the wide-awake Yankee shop keeper will begin to see, ere long, that this class of newspaper proprietor is making more money for himself than he is making for them. Driving away the rich in order to feed the poor on sensations is, to be sure, a form of philanthropy, but in a commer cial country it is a form of charity that not only begins, but stays, at home, in a few newspaper offices. This freedom of the press has its advan tages, perhaps, in one particular respect, and that is, the general confidence on the part of the public that their newspapers are T if buying not, as a rule, bribed for financial or mer- of news- , 111 papers. cantile purposes ; though no doubt the weaker provincial newspapers are regular ly subsidized by one side or the other in every great political campaign. Some times, when great questions of financial or economic policy are at stake, enormous sums are spent in this way, the party which does the subsidizing, of course, holding that such expenditure is a legitimate education of the people. In conclusion, one may say that at least 284 American Newspapers the American newspaper ries hard to be entertaining and interesting, and often suc ceeds. So far as many of their editors and contributors are concerned, I ought to be, and certainly shall be, always hereafter the first to maintain that they are not only in teresting and entertaining, but delightfully hospitable, as well. Be it said that this is true of many other departments of Ameri can life. The men are better than their The men themselves. work. Travellers who meet and know Americans, are, as a rule, confident of the final outcome of American institutions. Those who judge of America by American work alone, or by American diplomacy, or by Americans idling in Europe, are more prone to pessimism. 285 XXI Conclusion T is no easy matter to sum up one s impressions of a nation of seventy millions of people scattered over a country ex tending from the Atlantic to the Pacific Finally, Ocean, and from Canada to the Gulf of brethren -.- T /v Mexico. There are so many different na- tionalities, so many different climates, so many different interests, that one finds state ments of facts for one section, and one class, and one climate, are no longer fair statements if applied to another section, another climate, another class. While there is social snobbery in New York, and intel lectual snobbery in Boston, and painful superficiality In Chicagp, there is nothing pf the kind in Bloody Gulch, or Daven port, or New Orleans, or Galveston. This very diversity makes the country in- {ejresting to the traveller who goes from 286 Conclusion place to place merely to see or to hear some new thing, but, contrariwise, makes each particular locality seem monotonous and provincial to the European accustomed to have all climates, all classes, all interests centred in some one capital. Paris, Berlin, London, Rome, Buda- Pesth, offer a far greater variety, both in tellectual and material, than any one city in America ; and yet, if one travels about in America, one finds a little of London, Paris, Berlin, Rome, and even Buda-Pesth tucked away in one corner or another of this huge country. Everything that one says may be true, and still everything may be contradicted by the righteous wrath of some community where such and such a state of things does not exist. If a certain condition of social what is affairs exists in New York, and the traveller deems that American, the citizen of Daven port bears witness that it does not exist there, and therefore accuses the traveller of knowing nothing of America. Lynching is American in South Carolina, but it is not American in Boston at least America and the Americans not since 1860 or thereabouts; to go to dinner, or to the theatre, with one s back and bosom bare, is American in New York, but such a display in Davenport would render the offender liable to arrest, or, at any rate, certain of social condemnation ; to babble of Stendhal, and Rossetti, and Browning is American in Chicago, while it would be simple lunacy in Bloody Gulch ; to have a tub and a clean shirt and collar, to shave, and to dress for dinner every day, is American in Washington, and excites no remark, but to do those same things in Valentine, Nebraska, would not only excite remark, but probably social persecution ; to have a valet, and to wear polished shoes, and to brush one s hair till it glistens, and to drive a tandem, is not only American, but commonplace enough in New York, while in Sioux City such behavior would be considered not only un-American, but anti -American ; to wear knickerbockers, parti -colored stockings, and a plaid waist coat excites no comment in the country about New York, but in Topeka an appari tion of that kind would assemble a crowd, 288 Conclusion and perhaps necessitate calling in the po lice. No wonder, then, that the Due de Lian- court, and De Tocqueville, and Savarin, among my own countrymen, and Mrs. Foreign Trollope, and Dickens, Lady Stuart Wort- ley, Richard Cobden, Frederika Bremer, Arnold, W. H. Russell, and other visitors from "abroad" to America, have called down upon their heads sneers, denuncia tion, and abuse. No doubt they all told the truth about what they saw, and told it amiably, and with the best intent in the world ; but this is the land of contradic tions, and it is an easy task for the native critic to pander to his sensitive fellow- citizens by showing only one side or the other of the picture as his case for the de fendant requires. It is evident then that I cannot, in good faith, offer apologies for mistakes to Mr. Difficult to Smith, in Davenport, and to Mr. Jones, in Bloody Gulch, when to Mr. Knicker bocker, in New York, and to Mr. May flower, in Boston, they are not mistakes at all ; or to Mr. Knickerbocker and to Mr. America and the Americans Mayflower for mistakes which to Mr. Smith and to Mr. Jones are not mistakes. I must take my chance with other visitors to America, should American critics deem my friendly and fraternal chronicle worthy of their notice at all. If I were asked to outline in a few para- A SUM- graphs the fundamental differences between this new civilization and the older civili zations of Europe, I should phrase the mat ter as follows : First, there is a strange exclusion of the more cultivated classes from even a proportionate share of author ity and responsibility in the governing machinery. The best men do not rule in domestic, nor guide in foreign, politics. They may do so indirectly, but they do not appear directly. This condition of affairs explains the rather happy-go-lucky political methods in vogue, and at the same time explains the fact that social life, the polite world, strikes the foreigner as be ing so unreal, so ineffective, so monotonous, so detached from great issues. In the old Greek world a man was only a citizen when he was a politician ; to the 290 Conclusion foreigner this democracy seems to require for stability, that every gentleman should be a politician, and every politician a gen tleman, but no honest traveller can say that such is the actual situation. Second, there is undoubtedly social dis content in this new country, as there is in Discontent Europe. In Europe, however, this discon- philosophy. tent poses at least as a philosophy, in some places even as a religion, and dignifies its vagaries under the various sub-titles of social ism. Here the social discontent is, mainly, outspoken and vulgar jealousy. The result is what I have noted elsewhere, the fact that classes are farther apart, less in touch with one another here, than in Europe. This seems at first sight improbable, till one remembers that good-fellowship and even friendship may exist in spite of conflicting opinions, but never in spite of distrust and jealousy, particularly jealousy of this sordid kind. This aloofness on the part of the polite and the cultured, and this undisguised and untempered jealousy on the part of the less fortunate classes, are salient characteristics 291 America and the Americans of the life here, life, that is, as it would be looked at from the point of view of the foreign student. All the details, anec dotes, illustrations, and comments in the foregoing pages may be traced more or less directly to these larger considerations just named. I like America and the Americans so much ; they have been so hospitable, so generous, and so friendly to me ; their country is so evidently prosperous, I can not fancy that in these journal pages I Analogy have passed criticisms unworthy of them or of me. If I have done that, then I beg here and now to apologize \ certainly that is a mistake, not only as against New York but as against Bloody Gulch, not only as against New Orleans but as against the most northern community in Oregon. Of the one triumph most desired, I can not, in any event, whether critics be kind or harsh, be deprived. The lady for whom the journal was first undertaken en joyed reading the manuscript, and thought the Americans must be a "curious and interesting people; " she may, alas, have 292 in advance. Conclusion read it hastily none the less my task and the impression that I wished on the whole to produce were both accepted as they were meant. 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