v\ 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 OF THE 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CAI& 
 
 Class 
 

The 
 Land of the Dollar 
 
 By - 
 G. W. STEEVENS 
 
 New York 
 Dodd, Mead and Company 
 
 1898 
 
PREFATORY NOTR 
 
 1 HAVE to thank the proprietors of the Daily Mail, 
 for which these letters were originally written, for 
 permission to republish them. They have been re 
 tained in the form of a diary, as it is in the gradual 
 initiation of an ignorant but unprejudiced English 
 man into American institutions and character that 
 any interest or usefulness of this book must consist 
 
 
 57250 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 I. THE VOYAGE ..... t 1 
 
 II. NEW YORK . ..... 10 
 
 III. WHERE NEW YORK LIVES .... 20 
 
 IV. THE DOLLAR ...... 29 
 
 V. THE U.8.N ........ 38 
 
 VI. BOSTON ....... 47 
 
 VII. A STATE ELECTION ..... 64 
 
 VIII. A STATE CONVENTION . . . . 63 
 
 IX. NIAGARA . . A V V V ^T* A * ^ 3 
 
 X. WILLIAM J. BRYAN I DEMAGOGUE . /fc 1. 80 
 
 XI. THE CAPITAL AND THE CAPITOL . ^fjSUL/ 88 
 XII. IN THE SOUTH . . . . . .96 
 
 XIII. SOUTHERN POLITICS ..... 105 
 
 XIV. PHILADELPHIA ...... 115 
 
 XV. AT THE SHRINE OP M KINLEY . . .124 
 
 XVL ANTI-ENGLAND ..... . 133 
 
 XVII. CHICAGO . , . . . . . 144 
 
 XVIII. AMONG THE DAIRY-FARMERS . . . 153 
 
viii CONTENTS. 
 
 XIX. THE CAMPAIGN 164 
 
 XX. FOOD AND DRINK 176 
 
 XXI. THE BIGGEST PARADE ON EARTH. . . 18") 
 
 XXII. OUT WEST 195 
 
 XXIII. A STRIKE ....... 204 
 
 XXIV. AMONG THE MORMONS .... 212 
 XXV. THE PACIFIC SLOPE ..... 224 
 
 XXVI. THE ISSUE 234 
 
 XXVII. THE HEATHEN CHINEE . . . .242 
 
 XXVIII. ON THE ROAD 252 
 
 XXIX. BUSINESS 264 
 
 XXX. WAITING 274 
 
 XXXI. THE DAT ....... 284 
 
 XXXII. THE OUTLOOK . . . . . 296 
 
 XXXIII. THB AMERICA* ...... 306 
 
Or THF 
 
 f UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF 
 
 * ircKK^ 
 
 THE LAND OF THE DOLLAR 
 
 THE VOYAGE. 
 
 NHW YORK, Septembc* i. 
 
 IF Africa begins at the Pyrenees and Asia at Buda 
 pest, then America begins on the departure platform 
 at Euston. There, at least, it began on the blazing 
 29th of August when, an obscure and perplexed 
 Columbus, I started on a voyage of discovery to 
 America. Men and women, children and infants in 
 arms, the platform was black with the inhabitants 
 of the States, hastening back from their descent on 
 the Old World. The station rang with their greetings 
 and partings ; the masses of their ironclad trunks 
 swayed and toppled till they threatened to overwhelm 
 Americans and Cunard Special and Euston itself. 
 This was not merely the beginning of America. It 
 
 A 
 
2 THE VOYAGE. 
 
 was also what I did not realise till later the begin^ 
 ning of the Presidential election. For two months 
 already the West- bound packets had been ferrying 
 home the same nervous crowds, in haste lest there 
 should be no room for them later. Crisis was in the 
 air, and all were hurrying back to safeguard their own 
 interests and those of the country they all adore. 
 
 The whistle blew ; I jumped in ; the train started ; 
 a practical friend on the platform had the happy in 
 spiration of hurling in my luggage in a volley after 
 me, and I was on the way to America. The run to 
 Liverpool is very much the same, I noticed, when you 
 are going to America as when you are only going to 
 Liverpool. I expect it is different coming back. But 
 at the end of the journey, after the Mersey Tunnel, it 
 suddenly begins to be very impressive. Along silent 
 wharves, across dingy streets, through dim warehouses, 
 under huge dead walls crawled the train. I was now 
 cut off from my country for good, and had got to go 
 on with it, for nobody surely could ever have found 
 the way back through that vast deserted maze. Then 
 all at once we drew up in the bare Riverside station, 
 and next moment appeared the quay and the giant 
 Campania, the largest ship in the world. The Cam 
 pania is very like any other ship seen through a 
 powerful magnify ing-glass. The great length over 
 600 feet and the comparatively narrow beam destroy 
 any beauty in the lines. The vessel recalls Alice in 
 Wonderland when she ate the elongating mushroom. 
 
AN OCEAN FERRY-BOAT. 3 
 
 But two most enormous red funnels, with ventilators 
 and bridges on the same scale, maintain a due propor 
 tion. As a ship the Campania is too big to be regarded 
 as a personal friend, but she is an unrivalled way of 
 getting to America. She does not walk the waters 
 like a thing of life ; she pushes sturdily through them, 
 flinging great walls of green water off her bows. As 
 to her qualities as a hotel there is more diverse opinion. 
 Her idea in life is to get you to New York as quickly 
 as possible, rather than to make you comfortable on 
 the way. Comfortable up to a certain point, of course, 
 you are, but not to the point of luxury nor of making 
 the ship a home. The captain and navigating officers 
 live apart from the passengers ; they are not dispen 
 sing hospitality, but taking you swiftly and safely 
 across the Atlantic. For the rest the Campania is not 
 built with any large available space of deck for athletic 
 sports and such diversions as other voyages afford. 
 Nor, indeed, is the time at sea long enough for such ; 
 you are just beginning to know your fellows by the 
 time you get Sandy Hook light abeam. Briefly the 
 passage of the Atlantic has ceased to be a voyage, and 
 become a ferry. The available space of deck is occu 
 pied by serried ranks of deck-chairs, and the ship s in 
 habitants sit and sit, and are sea-sick. The casualties 
 of the first day out were terrible, and not till Long 
 Island was in sight were they really salved. The 
 other main diversions of the voyage resolved them 
 selves into reading unimportant novels aloud, by 
 
4 THE VOYAGE. 
 
 pairs, on the deck, and gambling in the smoking-room 
 the nobler and the manlier one. Also there was 
 eating. In reference to eating, I hold that the food 
 provided by the Company is as good as you can expect, 
 but this view was not held by all, or indeed by many. 
 As good as you can expect possibly ; but does this 
 mean as good as you ought to get, or only as good as 
 you are likely to get ? The Cunard has a noble repu 
 tation for bringing its passengers safe to their destina 
 tion. But I am bound to say that there was a strong 
 body of opinion on board in favour of a trifle more 
 chance of death by drowning, so it were balanced by 
 a trifle less chance of death by starvation. I do not 
 share that view myself ; I am as difficult to starve as, 
 given a thousand miles from the nearest land, I should 
 be easy to drown. Yet if I am ever chairman of the 
 Cunard I think I shall make an effort. The food is 
 good enough, and there is plenty of it. Why not try 
 to make it nice ? 
 
 I observed no sort of snobbishness on the Campania, 
 such as you would hardly have missed with a boat 
 populated with the same number of our people. No 
 doubt the American has his veneration for the dollar. 
 But so far as I have seen which, mind you, is no way 
 at all as yet he reveres the dollar as an emblem of 
 power ; and I should hardly call it snobbery to respect 
 power. I had the good fortune to see a good deal of a 
 gentleman who was perhaps typical. He first won 
 my regard by the rare art with which he conveyed his 
 
THE DOLLAR ALREADY, 5 
 
 utter scorn for the steward without ever speaking to 
 him. Then we were thrown together as the only 
 members of our stewardship who faced dinner on the 
 day of sea-sickness. " Are there any lords on board ? " 
 he asked slowly in a half-misanthropic, half-wistful 
 voice he had the charm to possess. I got out the 
 passenger list and found none. " Any sirs ? " Only 
 one sir was forthcoming. " Ah," he said, brightening 
 a little, as one whose country had manifested a social 
 superiority over mine, " I expect there are a good 
 many moneyed men, though." Next morning he 
 opened the conversation. " How much should you 
 think this ship cost?" I was able to indulge him 
 with particulars of the cost of many of the important 
 ships in the world, and he began to confide in me. 
 " That s a fine woman," he said, looking up the table ; 
 " a very fine woman. I should think she was a very 
 expensive woman." Yet, though instinctively he re 
 ferred everything to the standard of the dollar, I 
 should say his feeling was simply respect for the 
 power of doing things that without dollars could not 
 be done. And his respect for the man of dollars was 
 only a concrete form of respect for the ability to 
 make them. 
 
 On the morning of the sixth day out from Queens- 
 town there began to crawl along the starboard horizon 
 a pale blue line. "What do you think," began the 
 wistful voice of my friend at my elbow " but you d 
 hardly have seen enough to judge of it yet." I assured 
 
6 THE VOYAGE. 
 
 him that my first impressions were not unfavourable 
 and turned for my second. As the screws kicked on 
 through the dancing waves, the line grt-w broader, 
 until it was plainly land ; high ground rose over the 
 deeper blue of the waters, and presently began to take 
 on colours of its own. Here was a faint green for 
 woodland ; there a misty yellow for sand. It was the 
 coast of Long Island, the first herald of America. 
 
 Then came buildings dimly outlined on the sky 
 line ; then the same pale appearance on the port side 
 also, which slowly shaped itself into the low dun 
 spit of Sandy Hook. Nearing this, the Campania 
 slowed down ; the lightship was abeam, and the 
 passage was over. Past the Hook we glided, and 
 then turned sharp to starboard into the noble ex 
 panse of New York Bay. The great ship crept 
 deviously along the deep-water channel, but over the 
 wide sheet of scarcely rippled water tiny launches and 
 steam yachts scudded round and round us, as if we 
 were a ten-knot tramp steamer instead of one of the 
 fastest couriers of the Atlantic. As early as this 
 much was unfamiliar to the English eye. The coast 
 ing schooners, flapping lazily in the vain expectation 
 of a wind, were all three-masted ; the ferry-boats and 
 harbour-service steamers were built high up out of the 
 water with large deck-houses, out of which protruded 
 the engines, see-sawing up and down. 
 
 The great cities of New York and Brooklyn began 
 to outline themselves against the clear sky. As you 
 
NEW YORK S SKY-LINE. 7 
 
 enter London from the Thames, you see little but a 
 few ghost-like spires, glimmering in a vast canopy of 
 smoke. New York and Brooklyn stand out clear and 
 smokeless against the blue of the heavens. The two 
 cities are profiled along the shores of the bay and 
 the Hudson river, and a strange jagged profile it is. 
 Brooklyn combines into a fairly even mass of build 
 ings, half yellow-grey, half chocolate, with a fringe of 
 masts along the water. Then the heap of buildings 
 slowly parts asunder in the middle ; you see the open 
 ing of the East Eiver, the frontier of the two cities, 
 and the slim lines of the Suspension Bridge. But 
 New York combines into no colour and no sky-line. 
 Here is a red mass of brick, there a grey spire, there 
 a bright white pile of building twenty storeys of 
 serried windows there again a gilded dome. Gradu 
 ally they disengage themselves as you pass up the 
 river in a line apparently endless. The rest of the 
 city lies huddled beneath them these buildings, too, 
 many coloured, all uneven, each one seemingly 
 struggling to shoot up alongside of the giants at 
 its side. That is the first impression of New York, 
 if impression it can be called. The truth is that 
 New York yields no impression; the big buildings 
 and the little buildings will not come into the same 
 view. It dazzles, and it astonishes, but it does not 
 make a picture. 
 
 The business of getting a 600-foot liner alongside a 
 wharf is painful enough to rub out the memory of the 
 
8 THE VOYAGE. 
 
 pleasantest voyage and beget a passionate longing for 
 the land. At last they brought us up, out swung the 
 gangway, and we swarmed down on to the crowded 
 wharf. For many minutes there had been greetings 
 from the throng of welcoming friends, with waving of 
 handkerchiefs and miniatures of the stars and stripes. 
 Now followed the embraces ; bearded men caught and 
 kissed each other. I saw, and passed on to get my 
 luggage inspected. The New York Customs Service 
 enjoys a world-wide reputation for ingenious incivility, 
 but for my part I am bound to say that this reputa 
 tion went wholly unfulfilled. I consigned my goods 
 to a baggage express, which duly delivered dinner- 
 clothes and sleeping-clothes at one in the morning. 
 As for my own vile body, I transported it in a cab, 
 not to say a brougham and pair. I had been warned 
 against the rash experiment, but having no vaguest 
 idea where I was or whither I had to go, I damned 
 the expense and took it. The price for about three 
 miles or so, not allowing for the rate of exchange, was 
 8s. 4d I wondered at the time why New Yorkers 
 stand such an abominable imposition ; but when I 
 afterwards learned that by other means you can get from 
 any point in the city to any other, almost as quickly 
 and comfortably, for 2Jd., I began to understand it. 
 
 The first impression of New York life was that 
 it gets very dark in the evening, and that the streets 
 are most disgracefully paved. If you imagine the 
 stones of Black friars Bridge taken up and relaid in 
 
NEW YORK S STREETS. 9 
 
 the nearest possible imitation of the upper surface of 
 a Bath bun, then you will get a rough general idea of 
 a first-class New York thoroughfare. It was refresh 
 ing, even after only a week at sea, to see trees and 
 horses. The horses look very light not to say weedy, 
 long-barrelled and loose-coupled when you think of 
 ours ; and I saw some shamefully starved. Yet there 
 is a lot of blood in them, and everybody knows what 
 the American trotter can do. We drove through the 
 falling dusk, and at first I thought the streets of New 
 York singularly mean. They recalled the last bit 
 of the railway journey at Liverpool deserted ways and 
 dead walls. But we were only passing through cross- 
 streets. Presently we flashed into a blaze of electric 
 light. A tram-car bore down on us, without any visi 
 ble means of propulsion, swift and noiseless ; it looked 
 more like a gliding reptile than a machine. Then we 
 rattled into a broad avenue, down the long middle of 
 which ran a sort of arcade, supported on iron uprights. 
 As the cab passed under it a couple of railway trains 
 rushed overhead and rumbled away up and down the 
 street. Not a featureless city, after all, New York. 
 So we arrived at the Waldorf Hotel, a palace of marble 
 and glass, gold and greenery. On sight, I was ad 
 judged worthy of Eoom 827, though if they had known 
 the poverty of my luggage, judged by the American 
 standard, who knows but what I should have been 
 banished to 8000 or so ? From 827, therefore, I pro 
 ceed to the conquest of New York. 
 
10 
 
 NEW YORK. 
 
 NEW YORK, September 6L 
 
 ON the first morning I got up and went to my eighth- 
 storey window : New York was spread out in bright 
 sunshine below. Never have I seen a city more 
 hideous or more splendid. Uncouth, formless, pie 
 bald, chaotic, it yet stamps itself upon you as the 
 most magnificent embodiment of titanic energy and 
 force. 
 
 The foreground of my picture was a lightning- 
 conductor, sweeping down from some dizzy, un- 
 imagined height aslant to the street below. Be 
 neath was a wing of the Waldorf; on the left a 
 deep, silent courtyard, whence some pittance of air 
 and light filtered into the lower floors ; on the right 
 a huge skeleton of iron girders that is to fill out 
 into yet another gigantic branch of this gigantic 
 hoteL Beyond lay the red, flat, sloping roofs of two 
 streets of houses, four- or five-storeyed, with trees 
 straggling up to the light between them : this might 
 
A CITY OF CHAOS. 11 
 
 have been a bit of Bloomsbury. Beyond these, shut 
 ting out the direct front, rose to double their height 
 the great, square, dirty white-and-yellow back of a 
 huge Broadway store ; the blind - looking windows 
 and outside iron stairs contradicted the comfortable 
 Bloomsbury streets with a suggestion of overcrowd 
 ing and squalor. To the right of this, half-covered 
 with creepers, a little church cocked a squat Gothic 
 spire at heaven. To the left was a peep of Broad 
 way, with cable cars ceaselessly gliding to and fro; 
 right on top of them, as it seemed, the trains of 
 the Elevated Road puffed and rattled in endless 
 succession. Just over the iron fretwork peeped a 
 little blue shop and a little red shop side by side; 
 elbowing them, a big greenish theatre, and beyond 
 thai again a great white block of business houses 
 with a broad blue band of advertisements across its 
 dead side. Emerging above that, another street; 
 beyond that, another square block of windows; a 
 clock-tower; then in a shapeless brown jumble the 
 city stretches away out to the steely band of the 
 Hudson and the pale green hills of New Jersey 
 beyond. 
 
 Walk down town towards the business quarter 
 if one part is the business quarter any more than 
 another : the impression is everywhere the same. 
 The very buildings cry aloud of struggling, almost 
 savage, unregulated strength. No street is laid out 
 as part of a system, no building as an architectural 
 
 * A7 *>X 
 
 THF \ 
 
 " Y } 
 
 or / 
 
 I UNIVERSITY ) 
 
12 NEW YORK. 
 
 unit in a street. Nothing is given to beauty : every 
 thing centres in hard utility. It is the outward ex 
 pression of the freest, fiercest individualism. The 
 very houses are alive with the instinct of competition, 
 and strain each one to overtop its neighbours. See 
 ing it, you can well understand the admiration of an 
 American for something ordered and proportioned 
 for the Eue de Eivoli or Regent Street. Fine build 
 ings, of course, New York has in every pure and 
 cross-bred style of architecture under the sun. Most 
 are suggestions of the Italian Eenaissance, as is the 
 simple yet rich and stately Produce Exchange, built 
 of terra-cotta and red brick of a warmer, and yet less 
 impudent, red than ours. In this lives the spirit of 
 the best Florentine models. Fifth Avenue is lined 
 with such fine buildings here rococo, there a fine 
 Gothic cathedral, then, again, a hint of Byzantine, or 
 a dandy suggestion of Mauresque. 
 
 Indeed, architects here appear far more awake to 
 what is beautiful than ours. Working on the old 
 models, they seldom fail to impart a suggestion of 
 originality. You will hardly find an eyesore like 
 the new Admiralty in New York. But too many 
 of the best buildings are half wasted for want of 
 space and place. The Produce Exchange has nearly 
 half its front cut off by a row of steamship offices. 
 Many of the most ambitious buildings in narrow 
 Wall Street are so high that it would break any 
 man s neck to look to the top of them. Each for 
 
FROM BROOKLYN BRIDGE. 13 
 
 himself is the motto of New York building, and 
 confusion takes the hindmost and the foremost, the 
 topmost and the whole jumble. No man could do 
 its architecture justice unless he had a pair of eyes 
 in the top and the back and both sides of his head, 
 with a squint in each of them. 
 
 The city stretches north from Battery Point, between 
 the East Eiver and the Hudson, so that it is over thir 
 teen miles long by about three wide. The best way to 
 see it as a whole, therefore, is from some such point as 
 the Brooklyn Bridge, whence I have seen it at night, 
 stretched out in front of a rosy sunset that bathed 
 even New York in softness. From that point the low 
 red houses sloping up from the waterside looked like 
 a carpet for the giants to tread upon. These sky- 
 scraping monsters stretch in a jagged backbone along 
 the central northern line of the city mere white 
 frames for windows, most of them appear square, 
 hard outlines, four times as high as they are broad, 
 with regular rows on rows of casements as close as 
 the squares in a chess-board. 
 
 And the whole city plastered and painted and 
 papered with advertisements. I do not know that 
 New York has much to teach us of the value of 
 advertising, but the irregular building of the place, 
 with acres of wall looking out everywhere over the 
 whole city, affords a fertile field which has been sown 
 and cultivated to the last inch. At the very entrance 
 of the harbour you are hit in the face by what it 
 
14 NEW YORK. 
 
 would be discourtesy not to presume the largest 
 advertisement in the world. " H-0 " is its simple 
 legend : the symbol was a touch of home, though I 
 have yet to learn what "H-0" is. There is also a 
 product called Castoria children cry for it, it ap 
 pears; which seems a poor enough recommendation 
 to the harassed parent. But its spirited proprietors 
 have bought up every wall in New York that faces 
 towards the Brooklyn Bridge. As you stand there 
 the red houses seem to be laced with gold letters ; the 
 whole city is yelling aloud concerning the virtues of 
 Castoria. There are no sky-signs, thank heaven, in 
 New York. But except the sky every place that will 
 hold an advertisement holds one. And these not the 
 finicking, bashful overtures of the effete East; no 
 chiropodist worthy the name but keeps at his door a 
 modelled human foot the size of a cab- horse ; and 
 other trades go and do likewise. 
 
 If I get back unlynched to England, I intend to 
 organise a movement for sending all the members of 
 the London County Council to New York. If they 
 return without learning a good deal as to how a city 
 should be organised on the material side, I should 
 then send them somewhere else. Take, for example, 
 the communications within the city: they are in 
 finitely ahead of anything ever dreamed of in London. 
 The place, as I have said, is very long and narrow, 
 and it pivots on its southern point at the site of the 
 old Dutch Battery. Here is the business quarter 
 
THE ELEVATED RAIL. 15 
 
 Wall Street, the Exchanges, the shipping offices, and 
 the like. As New York grows, the business quarter 
 naturally grows also, and pushes the residents either 
 to Brooklyn or New Jersey over the rivers, or else 
 where to the northward. 
 
 How are they to be kept in touch with their work ? 
 The problem is fairly simple, in so far as the suburban 
 traffic all runs in one or two main directions ; it is 
 difficult for the corresponding reason that there is no 
 space available for communications in the scanty 
 width of New York that is not wanted for something 
 else. The problem is solved, not by burrowing under 
 the earth, as we have done in London, but by the 
 Elevated Rail. Its iron pillars are planted along any 
 convenient street, the girders laid over them, the 
 sleepers and rails across the girders, and there you 
 have your railway complete. No doubt it spoils the 
 streets it runs along to a certain extent though they 
 are mostly wider than ours but I should much 
 wonder if it depreciated their value as business sites. 
 And, beyond any doubt, it is infinitely quicker, plea- 
 santer, and simpler than our own Underground. I 
 could travel on it hours every day for the mere plea 
 sure of the motion and of seeing New York. 
 
 The fare from anywhere to anywhere is 5 cents 
 nominally 2Jd., but in New York 5 cents mean what 
 a penny is to us. When you travel by it you do not 
 have to say where you want to go a great conveni 
 ence to me, as I never know. You pay your nickel, 
 
16 NEW YORK. 
 
 which is 2Jd., at the booking-office and get a ticket. 
 As the ticket is merely a check, there is no bother 
 about punching or collecting it; you drop it in a 
 vase as you go out on to the platform. The train 
 comes up the moment you have done so. Nomin 
 ally the trains run every minute and a half; in 
 reality, I can say quite honestly that I have seen 
 a train dozens of times run into a station before 
 the train in front of it had got clear of the plat 
 form. They glide on, chasing each other at some 
 two hundred yards distance, till it makes your head 
 ache to look at them. Engines and cars alike are 
 very light, and stop easily, so that there is never 
 an accident perhaps half-a-dozen killed annually 
 out of two hundred million passengers. 
 
 The moment you have landed or got aboard, the 
 conductor pulls a string that rings the bell on the 
 engine, and off you go. As I sit at my hotel 
 window I can time a train in the station : it is 
 motionless for just five seconds. The conductor 
 never leaves the train, and to prevent anybody from 
 getting out while the car is in motion, he can shut 
 the iron doors with a single motion of a lever. The 
 seats are arranged in part like those of our tram 
 cars, in part like those of our railway carriages; 
 you can sit which way you please. They are 
 cheaply and comfortably cushioned, and the cushions 
 have rattan covers all you want for a short journey. 
 So you spin along above New York, now swinging 
 
THE CABLE CAR. 17 
 
 round a sharp corner apparently into somebody s 
 first-floor windows, and then rattling between serried 
 lines of tradesmen s show-rooms. Who can wonder 
 that with so cheap and quick and easy a means of 
 travel the Manhattan Company carries nearly two 
 hundred and fifty million people a-year, and makes 
 an annual profit of a million dollars ? It deserves it. 
 If the Elevated Railway is off your route, you may 
 prefer the cable car. Here, again, you pay no more 
 than 5 cents, whether you go a hundred yards or 
 three miles ; naturally this means simplification of 
 organisation, and therewith saving of expense. I 
 need not describe the cable cars, nor yet the electric 
 tramways, even if I understood them. We have 
 them in England, though, of course, not in London. 
 And then there is our old friend the horse. I dare 
 not say how many tramway lines run North and 
 South in New York, or how many subsidiary lines 
 meet them East and West. On to many of the 
 last you can be transferred from the trunk lines, and 
 thus travel in two or even three trams, all for your 
 original 5 cents. Then, still for the same benef 
 icent nickel, and sometimes for even three or two 
 cents, or even only one, you have the choice of 
 about thirty ferries to take you to Brooklyn or 
 Jersey City or Staten Island, or anywhere. The 
 giant Suspension Bridge you can cross free, if you 
 like, by a promenade in the middle of it; if you 
 don t, you can take the cable railway on each side 
 
 B 
 
18 NEW YORK. 
 
 of the footway for three cents, or drive over in a 
 hansom by the waggon-track on each side of that. 
 It is worth all the money, not only for the gro 
 tesquely magnificent view, but for the pleasure of 
 seeing so well -arranged and practical a means of 
 popular transport. 
 
 The streets of New York, as most people know, 
 are named only in the older Southern quarter. In 
 the newer parts they go by numbers. The Avenues 
 First, Second, and the like run North and South, 
 beginning on the East side. The streets run East 
 and West, beginning from the South. To the Euro 
 pean mind this device is at first hateful. What 
 possible individuality can you associate with Sixty- 
 ninth Street? But after two days you begin to 
 appreciate it. For you have only to know the ad 
 dress of any place and you know not only exactly 
 the direction, but also exactly how far you have 
 to go. Of numberless other material and mechani 
 cal conveniences, which we might have and ought 
 to have and do not have in London, I must speak 
 some other time when I have more paper to speak 
 on. And yet high authorities say that New York 
 is the worst governed city in the Union. True, 
 the pavements are atrocious, and when it has been 
 raining, even the Sardanapalus luxury of the Wal 
 dorf is besmirched with a deposit of mud in your 
 bath. Also the place is almost worse lighted than 
 London. For the explanation of all this I hear 
 
PRACTICAL GENIUS. 19 
 
 already dark tales of municipal corruption almost 
 incredible to the simple Briton. It is true, again, 
 that the magnificent system of communications owes 
 little enough to municipal support. It is the true- 
 born creation of American enterprise and of the 
 only truly practical genius that just adapts means 
 to ends and no more. Yet, take it all together, 
 the County Councillor has still something to learn 
 from New York. And, if it is the worst governed 
 city, I, for one, could make myself very fairly com 
 fortable in the best 
 
III. 
 
 WHERE NEW YORK LIVES. 
 
 NEW YORE, September & 
 
 WHERE do the people of New York live ? Where, you 
 will ask, but in New York ? Quite wrong. New York, 
 squeezed in between the Hudson and the East Kiver, 
 is far too narrow for a tithe of those who do business 
 there to find habitations in the city. Moreover, at 
 the point where land might begin to be far enough 
 removed from the heart of the city for people of not 
 quite unlimited means to live, there comes Central 
 Park, taking up about a quarter of the available space, 
 and leaving only a little strip on either side. So the 
 man who works in New York must either retreat 
 even further North, and descend each day down the 
 tongue of Manhattan Island to his work, or else he 
 must get over one of the rivers into Long Island or 
 New Jersey. 
 
 If he chooses the first evil, he can either go North 
 of the Harlem Eiver and live in a house, or remain 
 below it and live in a flat. The Kiver is reached at 
 
THE SUBURBS. 21 
 
 Hundred and Fifty-Fifth Street : all New York South 
 of this is on Manhattan Island. Though this is called 
 an island it is really a peninsula ; that is to say, the 
 Harlem Eiver is a comparatively practicable stream. 
 It is possible to run bridges over it, whereas the con 
 nection across the Hudson with New Jersey must at 
 present be made entirely by ferries, and that with Long 
 Island very largely so. North of Manhattan Island 
 the suburbs stretch away almost endlessly. The 
 eastern part of them is called the Annexed District. 
 This is served by an extension of the Elevated Eailroad 
 and by the New York Central. The West side con 
 nects with the Elevated Eailroad, which ends at 
 Hundred and Fifty-Fifth Street, by the New York 
 and Northern Eailroad. And beyond the continuous 
 line of houses from Battery Point, the southernmost 
 limit of the city, to the northern suburbs stretches 
 town on town, village on village, almost endlessly, 
 each sending in its daily contingent to the huge dollar- 
 hunt of New York. 
 
 Suppose you want to live nearer your work say 
 within half an hour or so then you must live in a 
 flat. Land is too scarce to allow a whole house South 
 of the Harlem to any man far short of his million. 
 Flats are of every kind and of every price. There 
 are flats to which the working man and junior clerk 
 can aspire without presumption, and flats which the 
 millionaire need not despise. The cheapest run to 
 about nineteen or twenty dollars a -month. This 
 
22 WHERE NEW YORK LIVES. 
 
 means nearly 50 a-year, which seems a back-breaking 
 rent for the most prosperous mechanic to pay. For 
 this he will get four rooms, a kitchen with gas-range 
 and hot water laid on from the basement, a bedroom, 
 a dining-room, and a parlour. The rooms are very 
 small, they generally look out at a dark courtyard, and 
 often there is only one front door and a common hall 
 say, rather, a narrow passage between two of them. 
 Your neighbour may be an Italian costermonger or a 
 Polish-Jewish vendor of old clothes. In any case he 
 is almost sure to be noisy, while the court will be 
 filled with clothes drying and the smell of every un 
 savoury kind of cooking in the world. In summer court 
 and staircase, front steps and streets, will swarm with 
 squalling children. Yet, take it all round, there are 
 advantages which no mechanic in England is likely to 
 find. The sanitary, heating, and lighting arrangements 
 are better, the stairs and halls are carpeted, the whole 
 place is decorated, not magnificently, but at least with 
 an attempt at grace and comfort. The Englishman 
 will often be more comfortable, but he will hardly find 
 a dwelling with such an air of social self-respect 
 at any rate, while it is new and unoccupied. You will 
 answer that the English mechanic would never dream 
 of paying 50 a-year in rent. Probably not. But 
 then the New York mechanic can afford it out of his 
 wages, and the Englishman cannot. To the under- 
 cierk such flats as these offer themselves as a cheap 
 and handy abode, Jn New York there is none of the 
 
RENT. 23 
 
 foolish convention that compels the clerk with a pound 
 a-week to live in a more expensive house than the 
 working man with two. This is no doubt a blessing, 
 but it has its reverse side. If the carpet and the gilt 
 decorations stimulate social self-respect in the working 
 man, the cabbage-water and the brats on the doorstep 
 tend to destroy it in the clerk. 
 
 Moving upwards, you can get for eighty dollars 
 a-month, or nearly 200 a-year, very much the same 
 sort of flat in the same sort of quarter as you would 
 get for half the money in London. By a curious ex 
 ception to the usual excellence of American house- 
 fittings, some of these are being built without either 
 lift or electric light, though all have hot water laid on 
 from below. From the eighty-dollar flat you can 
 advance with your income or without it if you like 
 to almost any price. I have seen an apartment at 
 480 a-year, and one at 520. In London you would 
 expect a palace for the money ; in New York you get 
 certainly a most commodious and charming flat, but 
 still an unmistakable flat. The 480-pounder was as 
 conveniently arranged and fitted and as elegantly 
 decorated as any flat could well be. Yet, all said and 
 done, it contained only eight rooms, and those neither 
 very large nor very lofty. 
 
 And who lives in a flat that costs 500 a-year ? A 
 Londoner who should admit that he had taken such 
 might almost as well join a supper club at once ; his 
 respectability would be mortally wounded in any case. 
 
24 WHERE NEW YORK LIVES. 
 
 But in New York, the stranger learns with amazement, 
 a man will often take such an abode whose income is 
 but double his rent all told. It sounds incredible ; 
 but in New York almost everybody lives above his 
 income, and especially lays out his money, or his 
 credit, in directions where there is most swagger to be 
 got for it. Women, many people will tell you, are 
 especial offenders. While the husband works and 
 worries himself into his grave at forty, many women, 
 out of sheer ostentation, will hire a resplendent flat to 
 live in, even though there be next to nothing left to 
 live on after the rent is paid. But then there is always 
 an alternative policy not to pay. There is a class of 
 people in New York who appear to eke out a pre 
 carious subsistence by living rent-free in flats. When 
 the first month is out and the first rent is due, they 
 explain to the landlord that they cannot pay because 
 they have no money. They then depart and put in a 
 month in a new flat, and so on, at the rate of twelve 
 annually for ever. 
 
 In one way this existence hits the very ideal of the 
 New Yorker. About a month in one habitation is 
 just about as much as suits him. Compare the lim 
 pet Englishman and the gad-about American in this 
 respect. Their respective stability is very significant. 
 In London you cannot easily get a shorter lease of a 
 flat than seven years ; in New York it is a bitter hard 
 ship to be tied down to as much as one. Other griev 
 ances of the flat-dweller are the tyranny of the janitor, 
 
THE COMMUTER. 25 
 
 who is allowed to make rules for the house at his own 
 pleasure another fact very illustrative of democratic, 
 happy-go-lucky America and the fact that they are 
 not allowed to have any children. Anybody who has 
 lived in a flat can fully understand the objection to 
 this latter vice. But the Americans are too prone to 
 be childless as it is, and anything which discourages 
 increase and multiplication is almost a danger to 
 society. 
 
 The alternative to life in a flat is to become a com 
 muter and live across one of the rivers. A commuter 
 is the American for season-ticket holder; he gets a 
 combination ticket carrying him across the ferry and 
 then by railway to his house. He is despised by the 
 New Yorker; the comic papers are never tired of 
 representing him starting out for Lonelyville with a 
 huge bundle of town-bought provisions in his hand. 
 The reason for this contempt is not uninstructive. In 
 London the word suburban is sometimes used in 
 derision ; it is then meant to imply narrow-mindedness, 
 dulness, smug respectability. But the basis of scorn 
 for the commuter is no supposed defect of intellectual 
 elevation ; it rests need the fundamental factor be 
 invoked ? on the dollar. The commuter earns his 
 money in New York, and he spends it in New Jersey ; 
 that is his crime. True, the commuter might answer 
 that it is hardly logical to reprobate him for buying 
 his dinner in New Jersey, and at the same time to 
 laugh at him for carrying it home from New York. 
 
26 WHERE NEW YORK LIVES. 
 
 But in the contest of wits the commuter has little 
 spirit left to answer anything. 
 
 The nearer suburbs are Brooklyn, Jersey City, and 
 Hoboken, which are mainly occupied by working 
 men. They stand for Suuthwark and Battersea, 
 except that to Jersey City and Hoboken you have to 
 cross the river in heavy ferry-boats, built to carry 
 vehicles as well as people, which take about a quarter 
 of an hour in the journey. In winter, when fog is 
 thick and rivers are choked with ice, this sometimes 
 lengthens to an hour. If you live further out, you 
 have to add this hour to your railway journey. In 
 the suburban districts houses are cheaper than in 
 New York ; you can actually get a small one for 75 
 a-year, and a very good one for 200. Most people 
 living in New Jersey borrow money on mortgage from 
 the loan associations and build their own houses. 
 
 In this way there has been formed at Orange, about 
 a dozen miles out, a park of idyllic suburban villas. 
 You buy your land and put up your house, the Com 
 pany that owns the park taking care that it is up to 
 the general standard of elegance. You have your own 
 lawn, and the use of miles of most delightful wooded 
 hill and dale. Its impression of rusticity without 
 boorishness is altogether adorable. But Orange is 
 not for everybody. And even Orange you approach 
 through miles of unreclaimed grey swamp a soulless 
 desert but for certain manure-works, which drench 
 the whole State with murky, stinking fumes. To get 
 
THE CAUSE OF CORRUPTION. 27 
 
 to your work you may, like enough, have to change 
 from train to ferry, ferry to elevated rail, elevated to 
 tram car, and then have a bit of a walk at the end. 
 It is a toss up whether this will take you one hour 
 or three. All is done that man can do to perfect the 
 communications. But the geographical situation of 
 Manhattan Island remains. 
 
 The obvious deduction from all this is, that if you 
 are going to live in New York it is well first to take 
 the precaution of being a millionaire. But there is 
 also another more general result of the geographical 
 position. New York, as I said, is held by Americans 
 to be the worst governed city in the Union, and it is 
 all the fault of Manhattan Island. With a popula 
 tion either passing nomadically from flat to flat or 
 else settling many miles outside the city limits, it is 
 very difficult to get together any steady body of civic 
 opinion. The result is that municipal government 
 has been left to ward politicians of the Tammany 
 class, to their own comfort and that of their friends. 
 The amount squandered on public works of no public 
 utility is said to be enormous. Tammany made it a 
 practice to buy in the dearest market with the rate 
 payers money and take a commission. 
 
 Until this year the state of education in New York 
 was similarly deplorable. I am told that popular 
 education is not very much to boast of anywhere in 
 the States, except perhaps in Boston. The curriculum, 
 it appears, is too wide, filling children s heads with all 
 
28 WHERE NEW YORK LIVES. 
 
 sorts of undigested knowledge, but failing of the 
 mental discipline which comes of grinding away at 
 any subject no matter how useless on paper until 
 it is mastered. In New York, besides, the old system 
 put a premium on corruption and resultant incapacity. 
 The schools were organised in districts, with a local 
 body in command of the schools of each. Now local 
 self-government is the salvation of the world, so long 
 as the local unit of self-government is not too small. 
 When it becomes small enough to be a family party, 
 then corruption comes and inefficiency. In New York 
 the smallness of the district turned the schools into 
 the hands of the local bosses. The school-teachers 
 were drawn mainly from the daughters and the 
 maiden aunts of the leaders of Tammany Hall, and 
 they were not in all cases the best that could be 
 found. But in July of this year New York changed 
 all that. There is now an efficient and zealous cen 
 tral authority, with wide powers over all the schools. 
 And this example of purification is being plenteously 
 followed in other departments. From all I hear the 
 worst days of political corruption in the States are 
 over. But for all that, the problem of local govern 
 ment must always be difficult in New York, because 
 it will always be difficult to put your finger at any 
 moment on the New Yorker. 
 
29 
 
 IV. 
 
 THE DOLLAR. 
 
 NEW YORK, September 9. 
 
 THE dollar, like so many of the world s greatest, inspires 
 at first sight interest, but hardly affection. From a 
 casual study of the monetary controversy now raging 
 in this country, I had been led to expect that the 
 dollar was a gold dollar, and that Mr Bryan wanted 
 to turn it into silver. It cannot be too widely known 
 that the dollar as he is spent is neither gold nor 
 silver ; he is a piece of paper. Not only so, but often 
 a very worn and dirty piece of paper at that. It is 
 astonishing how a dollar will age in three or four 
 years. True, the paper reflects the greatest credit on 
 its inventor; it never tears though perhaps this is 
 because no strong man ever really tries to tear it 
 still, it is but a piece of paper after all. It bears on 
 its weather-beaten face an inscription to the effect 
 that there has been deposited in the Treasury of the 
 United States one silver dollar, which will be paid to 
 the bearer on demand. Others of the breed merely 
 
30 THE DOLLAR. 
 
 assert that the United States of America will pay 
 one dollar, without specifying its material. The 
 mysterious philanthropist who deposited the silver 
 dollar apparently prefers to remain anonymous ; while 
 where or how you cash it is left equally dark. It 
 must certainly be somewhere in Washington, whence 
 the United States of America date their promise, but 
 the American Eagle is too old a bird to give any 
 more precise address. The dollar, so far as my 
 experience goes, is always illustrated, usually with 
 a vignette photograph of some eminent citizen or 
 other, occasionally also with scenes from the life of 
 Columbus or some other appropriate subject. This 
 gives an aesthetic as well as a commercial interest to 
 the dollar, which cannot be too highly prized. Its 
 nominal value is 4s. 2d. 
 
 I say nominal value, partly because nobody in this 
 country seems to be quite sure just now what the 
 value of a dollar is, still less what it ought to be, 
 and partly for more personal reasons. It is a fact 
 well known to the practical traveller, though curiously 
 overlooked by political economists, that the expense 
 of living in a country is regulated by its unit of 
 currency. Thus if you take the Orient Express from 
 Paris to Vienna, your rate of living doubles itself on 
 the way. In Paris the franc is the unit. When you 
 get into Germany it is the mark ; you therefore spend 
 twelve pence where before you only spent ten. In 
 Austria you enter the dominion of the florin, and 
 
PRACTICAL HINTS FOR SPENDING MONEY. 31 
 
 gaily spend Is. 8d. under the impression that it is a 
 mark, and therefore a franc. Now, as the dollar, like 
 the franc, mark, and florin, is divided into one hundred 
 integral parts to wit, cents the first impulse of the 
 untutored English mind is to regard a dollar as a 
 shilling and spend it accordingly. Happily, however, 
 the dollar, being made of paper, also offers some points 
 of analogy to the 5 note. To break it up and to 
 receive only mere coin as change is something of the 
 same solemn and irredeemable sacrifice. By force of 
 this analogy I have now brought myself to regard all 
 dollars, or notes equivalent to multiples of a dollar, as 
 indifferently worth 5. But when once the dollar is 
 broken, this saving influence abandons me ; half- 
 dollars and quarters in the eyes of heaven florins 
 and shillings can only be regarded as sixpences, or 
 half-francs, and as threepenny-bits. So the dime 
 ten cents becomes a sort of penny, and the five- 
 cent nickel a halfpenny. As for the cent, it is 
 a mere irresponsible piece of childishness like the 
 farthing. The fact that the Americans will produce 
 indispensable newspapers for only one cent, which in 
 some respects I feel strongly worthy of admiration, 
 yet adds a complication to life which it might well 
 spare. 
 
 All this may be called the profane or non-political 
 view of the dollar. But just now the fortunes of that 
 always necessary and sometimes harmless piece of 
 paper constitute the one subject of interest for what 
 
32 THE DOLLAR 
 
 on brief acquaintance, and with the greatest respect 
 for Lombard Street and adjacent parts I should be 
 inclined to call the keenest business people of the 
 world. Is the dollar to be silver as well as gold ? 
 Is the silver dollar to be monetised, or re-monetised, 
 or constituted as primary or redemption money, or 
 whatever else you like to call it ? That, as everybody 
 now knows, is the Chicago platform, and, on this 
 issue, Mr Bryan and his Democratic-Populist party 
 Popocrats they are pleasantly called here stand 
 or fall. It is the one and only issue of the forth 
 coming election, just as Home Eule was our one and 
 only issue in 1886. Protection is not in it, and that 
 though Mr M Kinley is a candidate. His party had, 
 indeed, got up a little pamphlet entitled How 
 M Kinley is Hated in England/ on which it was 
 hoped he would ride triumphant into the Presidential 
 chair. But, in the dollar s hour of danger, even to be 
 hated in England has sunk to be a secondary recom 
 mendation. Out of twenty-four pamphlets actually 
 issued by the Eepublican party up to now, nineteen 
 deal with the currency question, arid only a beggarly 
 three with Protection. In any case, even supposing 
 Mr M Kinley wins hands down, any new M Kinley 
 Bill is like to be made impossible by the opposition 
 of the Democratic Senate, until the chances of human 
 life and the corruption of the human pocket this is 
 the way an American himself put it to me leaven 
 that body into Republicanism again. Hence you will 
 
THE CASE FOR SILVER. 33 
 
 find strong Democrats, sworn foes of Protection, as 
 hot for M Kinley or, more truly, as hot against 
 Bryan as the keenest Eepublican. Night and day 
 in every newspaper, in every cafe*, in every street 
 car, it is the dollar, and the dollar alone, whose fate 
 is discussed and determined. 
 
 It is difficult for me to do justice to the Silver 
 party, for the simple reason that, being just landed 
 in the heart of the Gold country, I can hardly find 
 a man who will go further than such pointed but un- 
 enlightening expressions of opinion as " repudiators," 
 "thieves," "liars," and the like. It is almost an 
 insult to ask a New Yorker even to state the case 
 for Silver. I was able, however, to get a summary of 
 the party s argument from Mr William P. St John, 
 treasurer of the National Democratic organisation 
 a gentleman, moreover, who has proved his financial 
 capabilities in an important business position here, 
 and his disinterestedness in resigning this rather 
 than his convictions as to the currency. The measure 
 advocated by Mr Bryan and his friends is that any 
 man owning silver bullion may have it coined into 
 dollars at the ratio of 16 parts by weight of silver 
 to one of gold 371/25 grains in the silver dollar 
 to be equal to 23 22 grains in the gold. The present 
 market ratio is approximately 32 to 1, so that this 
 means that the State is to double the value of the 
 silver dollar as against that of silver bullion. The 
 effect of this, it is plain, will be to depreciate the 
 
34 THE DOLLAR. 
 
 value of money as against commodities. When the 
 number of dollars in circulation is small, their value 
 in goods is high. When it is large, their value in 
 goods is low : conversely, the value of goods in dollars 
 is high. A contracted currency involves low prices ; 
 an expanded one, high prices. The enormous increase 
 in the number of dollars in circulation resultant upon 
 the free coinage of silver would therefore bring high 
 prices for agricultural products, a greater demand in 
 agricultural districts for manufactured goods, freer 
 employment of labour, higher wages, and finally, gain 
 to the very banker in an increased demand for money 
 for investment both in agriculture and manufacture. 
 In two words universal prosperity. 
 
 It is not apprehended by my authority that this 
 doubling of the legal value of silver will lead either 
 to an inrush of silver from abroad or to an outrush 
 of gold from the United States. European silver 
 money, he points out, is overvalued in gold, as com 
 pared with the silver of the United States, from 3 
 to 7 per cent, while silverware carries the additional 
 value of the labour expended upon it. As to the 
 East, the course of silver is ever eastward, not west 
 ward; and especially eastward to British India. As 
 to the value of gold, Mr St John contends that only 
 from one-fortieth to one-sixtieth part of the gold in 
 the United States is in actual circulation. The rest 
 is in the Treasury where it will stay, since the 
 
* 
 
 > 
 
 or THE 
 UNIVERSITY 1 
 
 ff AND IMPORT. 35 
 
 Treasury has the option of redeeming notes in 
 silver and in the banks, as the undisturbed portion 
 of their reserves against their liabilities where it 
 also will stay. 
 
 Any momentary tendency to cause a premium on 
 gold dollars will tend to increase exports and diminish 
 imports by increasing the net return to the exporter 
 from the sale of his gold bill of exchange, and by 
 adding to the cost of the bill of exchange with which 
 the importer pays for his foreign goods. Export will 
 thus increase and import diminish, until the former 
 overtop the latter. Hence, more manufacturing in 
 America, more wages, more market for home products. 
 Secondly, the balance of export over import means 
 that Europe must settle with the States in money. 
 Europe will settle in gold rather than lose 3 to 7 per 
 cent on her overvalued silver coin. With foreign 
 gold coming in, the silver dollar and gold dollar be 
 come exactly of equal worth in the States as bullion. 
 The ratio of 16 to 1 by weight is permanently estab 
 lished as the relative value of the two metals, coined 
 or uncoined. 
 
 Plainly there is no repudiation in this no paying 
 of a two-dollar debt with a single dollar. It means 
 simply raising the value of the silver dollar and lower 
 ing that of the gold dollar by one operation. Such 
 a project is honest enough, if only it is possible. That 
 it is possible no man else that I have spoken with will 
 
36 THE DOLLAR. 
 
 agree. My personal opinion is worth nothing; but 
 seeing that, large as are the United States, the world 
 is larger, I do not understand how the States can 
 set up an arbitrary ratio between the precious metals 
 all for themselves. However, there is the silver 
 theory officially stated as the best financial authority 
 states it. That the supporters of Mr Bryan hold 
 these views as a body, or even understand them, I 
 ain far from asserting. The Western miner and mine- 
 owner anticipate coining their silver into dollars at 
 double its present value. The Western farmer ex 
 pects to halve his debts by paying them, or continu 
 ing to owe them, on the silver basis, though this will 
 be no halving if the bullion value of the silver dollar 
 is to equal that of the gold. As for the most of Mr 
 Bryan s supporters, they are probably veteran Demo 
 crats, who find it impossible to declare themselves 
 against the nominations made regularly and formally 
 by a convention of their whole party. " If a plaster 
 Indian from outside a cigar - store were regularly 
 nominated," said a cynic, "these chaps would vote 
 for him." 
 
 For the rest, the position was summed up to me 
 by a very young man I met the other night at dinner. 
 "They re hungry," he said. "What s the good of 
 talking sound finance to a man when he s hungry ? 
 Feed him first, and then he ll listen. They haven t 
 forgotten Homestead, and they re sore. They know 
 
A STATESMAN. 37 
 
 that they can t be worse off than they are, and so they 
 go in for any change. If it s not free silver, it ll be 
 something else. If it s not this time, it ll be next. 
 And they re quite right." If this is true, the question 
 of this election is of a sort that goes deeper than 
 argumentations of political economy. I almost think 
 that very young man is the first American statesman 
 I have met 
 
V. 
 
 THE U.S.H. 
 
 NBW YORK, September 10. 
 
 BROADWAY cabk- car, 5 cents ; Brooklyn Bridge cable 
 railroad, 3 cents ; Brooklyn electric tramway, 5 cents 
 five miles, I should say, of quick and easy travel 
 ling for the American equivalent of about 3d. brought 
 me to where the Brooklyn Navy Yard sweltered 
 under at least a subtropical sun. Presently I was 
 inside a long two-storeyed wooden building, all cool 
 boarding and ventilation, and was shaking hands with 
 a spare,, working-like figure in a black-braided blue 
 undress uniform. It needed no words to say that 
 here was a man who understood his duty, and did it. 
 "I know you won t tell me all you can; please 
 tell me all you may," and I plunged into questions 
 about the three new first-class battleships which the 
 United States are just giving out to contract. It 
 appears that the United States, like all other Powers 
 in the world, are building their newest battleships 
 after our own models. The three vessels are armed, 
 
NEW BATTLESHIPS. 39 
 
 in sharp departure from earlier types, very similarly 
 to our own Majestic four big 13-inch guns, in pairs 
 forward and aft, and a dozen 6-inch quick-firers be 
 tween. "Our officers must have powerful batteries," 
 said my informant ; " it s the tradition of our service." 
 "Yes," I said, reflecting on some occasions when our 
 own ships have had cause to note the fact. "And 
 so they will have the guns," he went on, "whether 
 they ve the men to work them or the ammunition to 
 serve them." The displacement of the new ships is 
 to be about 12,000 tons; the armour much heavier 
 than the Majesties ; the speed less not over sixteen 
 knots an hour apparently ; and the draught of water 
 also much less. " We have made great efforts," said 
 my host, "to keep down the draught of our ships, 
 though up to now we haven t always succeeded as 
 well as we wanted to. Your Majestic and Eoyal 
 Sovereign would be almost useless on our coasts. 
 They could get into New York and the Chesapeake and 
 into Boston at high water, but hardly anywhere else." 
 Of the three battleships which will make nine 
 most powerful vessels of this type in the United 
 States Navy my informant predicted, doubtless 
 knew, that one would be built at San Francisco. 
 "I suppose that when she s finished she will be 
 brought round to the Atlantic?" I hazarded. "No," 
 he said ; " it is our policy to gather ships on the 
 Pacific coast. The Oregon" a very fine first-class 
 ship completed last year "was kept in the Pacific." 
 
40 THE U.S.N. 
 
 "But that splits up your force very much." "Yes," 
 he replied, "but it is our policy. You see we have 
 wanted a strong fleet there once or twice lately, and 
 we haven t had it." 
 
 "As in Chili, for instance," said I, diplomatically 
 ignoring our occupation of Corinto in Nicaragua. 
 "That would be serious for us in the Pacific if we 
 came to war." "Well, I suppose you would have a 
 great many ships to bring against us there too." So 
 we should; but quite certainly nothing east of Suez 
 fit to tackle the Oregon or the monster now pro 
 jected. How good exactly the American battleships 
 are it is difficult for anybody but their officers to 
 say. Till now they have been built on independent 
 American models, with little heed to the practice of 
 Europe. Certainly their gun-power is great, and they 
 are splendidly protected. There is hardly a gun 
 afloat which, even in theory, could pierce their 
 thickest armour. On the other hand, the coal-supply 
 seems faultily disposed, while their performances at 
 sea indicate either that their officers have yet to 
 learn their ways or that they are not at their best 
 in heavy weather. 
 
 I asked my authority why, considering the advan 
 tage to which torpedo-boats could be used in de 
 fending the shallow inlets of the Eastern coast of 
 this country, the Navy Department had built so few. 
 They have, indeed, built, or are just giving out to 
 contract, a couple of dozen or so ; but more than half 
 
CONGKESS AM) ITS MONEY. 41 
 
 of these are big sea-going boats, intended as much to 
 take part in a fleet action at sea as for coast and 
 harbour defence. " Well," he said, " our people would 
 always be ready to spend money for coast - defence. 
 It has been the policy of the Naval Department to 
 spend the money voted by Congress on sea -going 
 
 ships " He paused. "While Congress is in the 
 
 humour, knowing that it will always find the money 
 for torpedo-boats," I broke in impertinently. He 
 smiled. 
 
 Congress until lately has been the nightmare of the 
 United States Navy, as the Reichstag is of the German. 
 Congress is extremely desirous of getting a first-class 
 article for its money, but not equally anxious to pay 
 for its article. My entertainer gave a curious instance 
 of this. The new armoured cruiser Brooklyn has 
 recently been through her trials. She is a very fast 
 boat undeniably, and the newspapers duly proclaimed 
 her the fastest in the world. But I observed that the 
 weight at which she was tried was a thousand tons 
 less than her working displacement will be which is 
 equivalent to backing a colt for the Derby because 
 he could win it at eight stone. I asked him why his 
 Department followed the inept custom of our own 
 Admiralty in the giving out of trials that are not 
 trials. " Well," he said, " the explanation is really 
 simple. If the ship made over a certain speed the 
 contractors were to get a premium. If they had built 
 the ship Congress wanted for the price Congress paid, 
 
42 THE U.S.N. 
 
 they d have made a considerable loss on it. So the 
 ship was tried light so that they should get their 
 full premium ; then the job paid them." Very wonder 
 ful, we agreed, are the ways of Governments. But if 
 Mr M Kinley is elected, the navy looks forward to 
 generous supplies and good administration. In Eng 
 land Mr Cleveland has got all the credit for Civil 
 Service reform; but the navy dates its better state 
 from the term of Mr Harrison, and looks to Mr 
 M Kinley to maintain the Republican tradition. 
 
 Beyond question there are people here, and in 
 fluential people, who aspire to make the United 
 States a leading not to say the leading naval 
 Power. And it only needs a moment s thought upon 
 the boundless resources and the mechanical genius and 
 energy of this country to realise that, if this idea 
 becomes general, it will need a very rich nation, and 
 a very determined nation, to keep step with it. 
 
 "We believe in England," I continued, "that the 
 personal branch of your navy is the weakest." " The 
 men are improving," was the reply. " A great many 
 of them re-engage after their three years, and going 
 about this yard and the ships, as I do, I can see the 
 improvement very plainly. But the officers are too 
 old. Their experience is all of the wooden ships, and 
 they have not their heart in the new navy. But they 
 block promotion for the others. Now my contem 
 poraries in the service" he may have been about 
 thirty-five " are all lieutenants, and likely to remain 
 
SENTIMENT AND CORRUPTION. 43 
 
 so fifteen or twenty years. You see, the senior men 
 all fought in the war, and have a great deal of in 
 fluence, and they won t budge." 
 
 Thence the talk drifted to the malign influence of 
 the politician. We smiled together over the fact that 
 the Hartford, Admiral Farragut s old flagship, which 
 has been obsolete any time these forty years, has been 
 fitted with new quick-firing guns, whose strong recoil 
 would tear her venerable wooden body to pieces if she 
 ever tried to use them. " The money might as well 
 have been thrown overboard," he said ; " but that s 
 democracy, with its sentiment." But till lately there 
 were worse things than sentiment. "Before I came 
 here," he went on, " I was stationed at a yard where 
 the artificers were regularly nominated as each new 
 Government came in, by their political clubs. I my 
 self, because I never vote or take any part in politics, 
 had applications made to remove me from my post 
 under both Democratic and Kepublican Governments, 
 on the ground that I was on the other side. But I 
 resolved to have no political nomination of workmen, 
 and did what I could to get the best men because they 
 were the best. So I was hauled up to Washington. 
 This ll never do/ said the Secretary. If it doesn t 
 do my way, I said, it ll have to do without me/ 
 Young man/ said the Secretary, go back and do 
 your duty ! A Minister," explained my friend, broad- 
 mindedly, " is only too glad when he can get an excuse 
 for stiffening his back." 
 
44 THE U.S.N. 
 
 "It seems to me about your Admiralty/ he went 
 on, "that it s too much in the hands of commercial 
 people." " Such as contractors ? " " Yes. Why else, 
 for instance, did your navy keep using compound 
 armour, when everybody else knew it was not the best 
 article in the market ? You nearly made us use it, 
 but we had a trial, and it was smashed to pieces. 
 Why are you so often behindhand with new improve 
 ments, unless it s to save the contractors the expense 
 of new plant ? Now, with us, although a law may be 
 absolutely corrupt, a simple steal, it will always be 
 executed with absolute honesty. With you it seems 
 the other way about." With Mr Goschen refusing to 
 lay down new battleships for fear of inconveniencing 
 contractors, who are unable or unwilling to set up the 
 plant for making modern armour-plates, I am afraid it 
 looks as if there is some ground for this comparison. 
 
 " While we re talking of England," he added, " I am 
 glad to have the opportunity of saying that your Ad 
 miralty has always given us every help and facility. 
 For instance, until quite lately you always used to 
 train a couple of students for us at Greenwich, though 
 this privilege was really intended only for countries 
 that had warships built in Great Britain. Sometimes 
 our Government has repaid you with scant courtesy 
 for instance, they once sent two students to England 
 without even saying they were coming. But in the 
 service we recognise that you have helped us very 
 much." 
 
DISCIPLINE ? 45 
 
 Thus we discoursed as we picked our way over 
 wires and rails and scrap-heaps, under cranes, through 
 buzzing machine-shops, and across the gangways of 
 ships. There was the low, black ram, the Katahdin, 
 which fell short of her contract speed on trial, but 
 was nevertheless accepted in the cause of Venezuela. 
 " And what are you going to do with her, now you ve 
 got her?" I asked. "Incubus," he replied tersely. 
 There were also the armoured monitors Puritan and 
 Terror, with pairs of long, heavy guns thrust out of 
 steel turrets. These are very low in the water, but 
 I was told they are quite equal to a voyage to the 
 West Indies, or even to South America. Also there 
 was " cruiser Bancroft" as the newspapers affection 
 ately call her a fat little boat, with four 4 -inch 
 quick-firers which is sailing to-morrow for Con 
 stantinople, in flat defiance of the Monroe doctrine. 
 The rest of the fleet was where it should be man 
 oeuvring at sea. Such seamen as I saw looked active 
 and resolute fellows, as they are bound to be. Perhaps 
 it was prejudice, but I seemed to miss something of 
 the elastic smartness and cheery alertness that make 
 our own bluejacket the idol of his countrymen. The 
 truth is that the free citizen of the United States does 
 not take kindly to discipline. Brought up from baby 
 hood to hold himself as good as, or a shade better 
 than, anybody else in the world, he hardly sees at first 
 why his officers should order him, any more than he 
 should order them. I have heard, from another source, 
 
THE U.S.N. 
 
 that the officers of American warships dare not show 
 themselves below deck at night. This may be an 
 exaggeration, yet it is in the services that one would 
 expect to see the reverse side of American self- 
 reliance, otherwise so admirable. But as I took 
 reluctant leave of my hospitable entertainer, and 
 wandered out into scorching Brooklyn, I reflected 
 that here is a navy growing up on which, with the 
 friendliest will in the world, our own will have hence 
 forth to keep a wide open eye. 
 
BOSTON. 
 
 BOSTON, September IS. 
 
 I HAD not been so hot since August 1893. Veteran 
 New Yorkers, who had passed through the tremendous 
 ordeal of a month ago, hurried about down-town, even 
 they, with brows beaded nay, embroidered with 
 sweat. Of an evening crowds blocked Madison Square, 
 and gasped for air as fishes for water ; the blare of the 
 band was a sirocco in itself. When it became too hot 
 to sleep it became too hot to stay. New York, above 
 all cities, is not the place for the insomniac. I have 
 mentioned, with premature enthusiasm, the fact that 
 the Elevated Railway runs trains every quarter of an 
 hour all night. I did not mention what I then did 
 not know that brakes squeak and groan, engines puff, 
 carriages rumble, cable cars hum, gongs ring, hoofs 
 clatter, wheels rattle, and sirens bellow from the Bay 
 all with a stentorian insistence by night which they 
 did not seem to possess by day. Moreover, they will 
 not fuse into a single soothing roar, like London s , 
 
48 BOSTON. 
 
 each egotistical sound compels the brain to recognise 
 it apart from all the rest. " That s a cable car," says 
 the brain ; " and that s an elevated train ; and that 
 must be a steamer in the Bay " ; and while the brain 
 is on this sort of treadmill it is hopeless to wait for 
 sleep. 
 
 So I turned my back on this splendid spectacle of 
 restless energy to find a spot less splendid and more 
 restful. Five hours in a drawing-room easy-chair, 
 with smoking-room ditto to change into at will, and a 
 table laid in the car for lunch, brought me to Boston. 
 That cost seven dollars the same sum to a sixpence 
 as the London arid North- Western charge from Liver 
 pool without the easy -chair, or the change to the 
 smoking-car, or the luncheon-table. No trouble to see 
 your luggage put in by a porter : you take it to a 
 counter in the station, and get a check for it by way 
 of receipt. No trouble at the other end : an agent 
 takes your check before you arrive, and the luggage is 
 delivered at your hotel. True, this costs a little extra, 
 but is it not worth it ? If you like you can even get 
 a ticket and pay for your cab before you leave the 
 train. From all of which considerations it appears 
 that we have not yet learned the A B C of railway 
 travelling in England. The railway magnates here are 
 abused as monopolists who milk the public to make 
 enormous fortunes for themselves, and I doubt not 
 that they do. Only if in the process of milking and 
 making they can still afford to let the public have an 
 
A GERMAN ASPECT. 49 
 
 article far superior to ours at nearly the same price 
 that in a country, mind you, where most other things 
 are a deal more expensive then what can be wrong 
 with our own system at home ? 
 
 The villages of New England, as seen from the 
 railway, are no more to be mistaken for those of Old 
 England than is New York for an English town. Both 
 wear a German rather than an English face. In the 
 city the painted houses, their rows of windows as tall 
 as the rooms they lighten, fronted by ironwork bal 
 conies, arid flanked by lathed shutters, could hardly bo 
 English ; the very type in which the advertisements 
 are printed has a Continental air. Along Broadway 
 two names out of three are German, and every other 
 one of the two German-Jewish. In the country all 
 the houses are of wood boards, painted white or light 
 yellow or buff for the most part, with shutters and 
 window-frames picked out in brown or green. To the 
 English eye they are oddly like pictures on the lid of 
 a German box of toys. 
 
 The country looks a hard one to squeeze a living 
 out of. I saw a few brown stooks and dishevelled 
 fields of maize, and some stock at pasture; but not 
 much. Most of it is woodland. Here and there a 
 patch of flame -coloured fern spoke of the touch of 
 autumn, or a green tree put forth a sudden branch as 
 red as blood. But the telling feature of the land 
 scape was once more its advertisements. Across the 
 meadows, down the curling reaches of the rivers, from 
 
50 BOSTON. 
 
 every gap in the woods, peeped the persistent intima 
 tion that sarsaparilla makes the weak strong, and that 
 children cry for Castoria. Every rock of any size and 
 flatness was blazoned with these same great truths. 
 Whether we learned it from America, or America 
 from us, I do not know. But I feel that I too shall 
 cry for Castoria if it is to dog me thus over a whole 
 continent. 
 
 Boston is fringed with wooden houses, but the 
 interior is more substantial. You are struck imme 
 diately with its decent, comparatively English air as 
 contrasted with New York. The houses have not 
 shot up and gone to seed ; they preserve an even sky 
 line, and you see whole terraces built on a single plan. 
 Not but what Boston possesses features of useful 
 ugliness, which even New York lacks. The tram 
 cars, for instance, which all go by electricity, have 
 sticking up from the roof of each an inclined rod 
 rather like the back leg of an easel, which runs along 
 a wire overhead. The effect of these wires, together 
 with a crowd of others in the telegraph and telephone 
 services, is as if a gigantic spider had spun a web low 
 down over every street, and was waiting somewhere 
 on the roofs to pounce on any Bostonian who should 
 invent a flying-machine and endeavour to fly through. 
 As for the tram-cars, Boston is a paradise of them. 
 Never have I seen a tramway service more thoroughly 
 developed. In the busy parts of the city they are 
 crawling along every street in long lines at a few 
 
THE BOSTON PARKS SYSTEM. 51 
 
 yards sometimes but a few inches distance apart. 
 Eed and blue, brown and purple, yellow and light 
 green and dark green, they wind and circle in and 
 out, between and across each other as if they were 
 engaged in an elaborate tram-car ballet. The very 
 Post Office has a neat white tram-car of its own, 
 wherein it transports the mails. 
 
 That which lifts Boston from a busy, rather unim 
 pressive provincial town into an example to the world 
 is the system of its public parks. They are not 
 finished yet nothing in America is, except some 
 of the politicians but when they are they will be 
 a rare monument of wise and generous civic spirit. 
 Boston may then increase to a city of ten million 
 souls, but it will yet be possible to live in the very 
 centre and get daily fresh air. The parks form, 
 roughly speaking, a wide ring round the present city, 
 connected in great part by a band of broad, well- 
 timbered avenues. I set out the other morning to 
 inspect the parks system in an even downpour that 
 would have made an inquiry into the surface drainage 
 more pertinent. First came Boston Common, where 
 they play baseball, hockey, football, and the like. 
 It is not unlike the grassy parts of Hyde Park, with 
 the exception that many of the walks are paved an 
 improvement of which this particular morning clearly 
 demonstrated the prudence. Next was the Public 
 Gardens adjoining the Common as gracefully laid 
 out as you could wish to see. Palms of every kind, 
 
52 BOSTON. 
 
 hydrangeas, with thick, nodding heads of flesh- 
 coloured blossoms, ponds with water-lilies of every 
 size and colour blue, crimson, pink, yellow, and 
 white, all subtropical plants and shrubs, beds of 
 cunningly combined flowers and foliage cannas, 
 balsams, begonias, indiarubbers, coleus make up 
 between them a garden of the rarest beauty. Only 
 one fault could I find in the Garden or the Com 
 mon, and I mention it because I may never have 
 the chance of using the word again in this 
 country. They are just a little too small. But 
 you cannot say the same of Franklin Park, 
 wherein the whole half-million or so of Boston s 
 inhabitants could all disport themselves without 
 jostling. On the day I saw it Franklin Park con 
 tained just one person and the rain, but that was 
 more the rain s fault than the park s. Laid out with 
 cunning imitation of a natural wildness, it extends 
 for mile on mile of grass and thicket. Then there is 
 the belt of water and water-plants, called the Back 
 Bay Fens. No doubt they are most refreshing in 
 summer, but to-day, when Boston was one vast fen 
 itself, they were almost too fenny for long and close 
 acquaintance. 
 
 The architectural glories of Boston centre, I 
 suppose, in Copley Square. Here is the Public 
 Library, the Art Gallery, the Cathedral. The last is 
 built in what I may take the liberty of calling the 
 American style a mixture of Corinthian, Gothic, 
 
CLEAN BOSTON. 53 
 
 and Byzantine, with colour thrown in. The Art 
 Gallery is pretty enough with its two colours of warm 
 red brick, and the Public Library is a thoroughly 
 respectable-looking institution. Inside it contains an 
 adorably simple fresco by M. Puvis de Chavannes and 
 an appallingly complex Biblical allegory by Mr Sargent. 
 When the good Bostonian dies it will be granted her 
 to sit for ever and ever before this work with a 
 diagram and a numbered key. For Boston is held 
 the most cultivated of American cities, but perhaps 
 I may say that its true merit seemed rather its 
 cleanness. My fondest recollection will be of Con 
 stitution Avenue, with its double row of trees in the 
 middle, its broad, well-laid roadways on each side, its 
 red-brick pavements, fresh lawns, and creeper-grown 
 stone houses. A clean, sweet, wholesome remem 
 brance, breathing unostentatious comfort and i 
 ligent, refined, golden mediocrity. 
 
64 
 
 VIL 
 
 A STATE ELECTION. 
 
 BOSTON, September 15. 
 
 IT was my own fault. Why should I expect Port 
 land, Me., to be a seething centre of political activity ? 
 Yet I did. One gets strange superstitions about 
 places one has never been to. I had seen Portland 
 on the map so often, that now I was within a short 
 four hours of it it seemed wicked to leave it un- 
 visited. Moreover, there was an election in Maine 
 not the real Presidential performance, but a sort of 
 rehearsal for the election of a Governor, a Congress 
 man or two, State senators and legislators, and vari 
 ous constitutional oddments. Nothing of national 
 importance, of course. Maine has been Eepublican 
 all its life except once, when it went Democratic by 
 pure accident. And in any case the real battle of 
 this election will be fought neither in the extreme 
 East nor in the outer West. It is in the centre round 
 Chicago in Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, 
 Iowa that the key of the. position lies, and the can- 
 
AN EVERY-DAY RAILWAY TRAIN. 55 
 
 didate who carries these States will carry the country- 
 As for this part of the country I need only quote 
 the words of a gentleman encountered in the train. 
 " Bryan ? Bryan would stand no more chance in Maine 
 than a paper man in hell." And if you weigh for a 
 moment the exact degree of chance a paper man 
 would stand at that temperature, you will get a 
 rough measure of the prospects of free silver in New 
 England. 
 
 However, I thought I would accustom myself 
 gradually to the flamboyant methods of western 
 electioneering; so I rose up early in the morning, 
 took a ticket for Portland, and climbed up into a 
 smoking-car. I then discovered that my first rail 
 way journey in America of two days before had been 
 more than ordinarily luxurious. This car had not 
 easy -chairs, but only broad -seated, broad - backed, 
 velvet - cushioned lounges ranged down its whole 
 length. The car was full of men ; the smoke of them 
 thickened the air, and they spat steadily. Down the 
 middle aisle a boy marched continually to and fro 
 hawking a diversity of wares that would have brought 
 jealousy into the soul of Mr Whiteley. Each time 
 he retired to his end of the car I thought he was 
 done with at last; each time he popped out again 
 with something new to sell. " Cigars, gents ; cigars ; 
 playing-cards ! " was the first offer. Then came the 
 Boston morning papers ; then " Chocolates, fresh made 
 this morning ! " then " The pocket drinking-cup, re- 
 
56 A STATE ELECTION. 
 
 duced to fifteen cents ; only fifteen, gents, for the 
 pocket drinking-cup ! * Next he sprang forth with 
 the September magazines, then the comic papers, then 
 chewing-gum ; after that I made no further attempt 
 to keep up with his infinite variety. 
 
 Presently came along the conductor. I showed my 
 ticket ; he took it, and with a swift movement slipped 
 a blank pink ticket into the band of my hat. It was 
 a shock at first, but as he went round the whole car 
 labelling every passenger with his own appropriate 
 colour, I supposed it was all right. I wore his colours 
 in my cap like a knight of chivalry for four hours, and 
 there was no more bother about tickets. 
 
 Soon there rose up round me a spirited, if incon 
 clusive, discussion on the relative merits of the gold 
 and silver dollar, accompanied by a mellifluous stream 
 of the easiest and most finished profanity I ever heard 
 outside the British army. Everybody does it, both 
 cussing and discussing arguing out the question ap 
 parently rather from a personal friendship for gold 01 
 silver as a metal than from any definite economic 
 principles as to their due ratio. Thus in a cloud of 
 smoke, swearing, and argument we were whirled 
 through New England. 
 
 In due time we drew into a fair-sized station ol 
 Continental appearance. Everything here suggests 
 the Continent rather than England: you do not enter 
 the train from a platform as with us, but climb from 
 the level of the rails, while the carriages, as everybody 
 
"EVANGELINE" UP TO DATE. 57 
 
 knows, are of the long foreign type. The station was 
 Portland, and Portland was enchanting. It was like 
 a canto of Longfellow s " Evangeline " brought up to 
 date. The low stone-built station opens on to a wide 
 lawn of rich shaven grass. The pavements are of red 
 brick, as in Boston, but with broad ribbons of turf 
 between them and the road. The houses are part 
 spotless wood, part sober red brick. Every road is 
 fringed with shady trees. It is as sweet and whole 
 some as the wholesomest parts of Boston, with the 
 added grace that no other parts meet the eye. For 
 the city is set on a hill, and between each pair of 
 houses stretches a long vista over the rolling green of 
 Maine bordered with faint hills, or else over the still 
 blue Atlantic, with no boundary but the sky. Down 
 where the clipper schooners lie there are wharves and 
 a lumber trade, and that mars the idyll a little, for 
 America is not the land to import unnecessary pic- 
 turesqueness into the lumber trade. But that you do 
 not see ; it is under the hill. Likewise there are 
 electric tramways and wires overhead ; but these 
 droop gracefully between the trees, as if they were 
 only waiting for Chinese lanterns and an illumination. 
 And if there are electric cars, the town is also full of 
 horses and dogs, clean-bred and well-liking beasts each 
 one of them. The men and women are open-faced, 
 upstanding, and healthy, slow and laconic in speech, 
 a little hard in feature, and a little dour in disposi 
 tion for I take it that ease does not come unasked 
 
58 A STATE ELECTION. 
 
 to folks iii Maine yet honest and courteous in their 
 own fashion. Altogether a comely, cleanly, kindly bit 
 of New England ; and lie who likes living in a small 
 town might do very much worse than emigrate to 
 Portland, Me. 
 
 But where was the election all this while ? Where 
 were the flaming carriages I had expected to be meet 
 ing the electors, who, I knew, were coming in by this 
 train? Where were the favours, the banners, the 
 posters, the brass bands, and the processions ? Things 
 looked more like Sabbath afternoon than the election 
 day of the century. The fun must be higher up the 
 town, I said to myself, and took my habitual five 
 cents worth of electricity. Presently I descried a 
 huge blue poster. Here it is, I shouted inwardly; 
 but no: it bore merely the name of Jolly Nellie 
 M Henry in "A Night in New York." 
 
 It must be higher still. Presently we passed under 
 a couple of banners hung right across the street, bear 
 ing the respective features of M Kinley and Hobart 
 and Bryan and Sewall. But those you see every 
 where: there was still no whisper of an election. I 
 got down from the car and walked about the town. 
 Suddenly I caught, afar off, a glint of scarlet and 
 gold. There came slowly up the street a resplendent 
 waggon with six horses, in which a brass band made 
 deafening music. Here was the true Transatlantic 
 electioneering at last ! It came nearer, and behind 
 it appeared a file of gorgeously caparisoned horse- 
 
AN UNOBTRUSIVE ELECTION. 59 
 
 men. Better and better. I thought of the mounted 
 farriers of our Hyde Park demonstrations, but it was 
 a new thing to find them in a contested election. Now 
 I was about to see. By this time I was abreast of 
 the leading car. I looked eagerly beyond ; and then 
 and then a clown driving two donkeys tandem, 
 and behind him a swaying elephant with an adver 
 tisement on its back : " Smith and Seebright s World- 
 Eenowned Circus " ! 
 
 I walked desperately into the nearest hotel and 
 asked if somebody would kindly direct me to the 
 election. Then, at last, I found it. Two undistin- 
 guishable committee-rooms, hidden away behind shops, 
 and a polling-booth. No colours, no canvassers, no 
 hauling of reluctant voters to the ballot, no candidates 
 driving round four-in-hand. If this was an American 
 election, give me staid England. But it seems my 
 ignorance had betrayed me again. In this country 
 the excitement ceases on the eve of the poll, and 
 nothing remains for the actual day but the quiet gar 
 nering of the crop of votes. Confound my ignorance ! 
 I had lost a day. 
 
 However, I did observe that an American polling- 
 booth is not unlike the same article as found among 
 us. Shavings were on the floor; a bar stretched 
 across the room, and on the far side of it were 
 little loose -boxes round the wall for the voters to 
 vote in. I saw half-a-dozen laboriously discharging 
 the duties of free citizenship. It is no light matter 
 
60 A STATE ELECTION. 
 
 voting at an election like this. Besides your Governor, 
 your Congressman, your Senators, and members of legis 
 lature, you have to elect a Sheriff, a County attorney, 
 a County commissioner, and other functionaries whose 
 functions I know not. The form of the ballot-paper 
 emphasises what I had noticed before the enormous 
 stringency of the party tie in this country. Our 
 voting - papers simply give you the names of Smith 
 and Jones, and if you don t know which is which 
 the country is not going to help you. The American 
 ballot-paper marks off the whole list of each party s 
 candidates in a separate column, with its denomina 
 tion Eepublican, Democratic, and so on. If you 
 want to vote a straight ticket, as the instructions 
 put it, you just make a cross at the top of the list. 
 If you want to split the ticket that is, vote for 
 some of the party and not others you cross out the 
 name you object to, and write in its stead that of 
 your fancy. When the State thus conspires with 
 party discipline, it must require very solid strength 
 of mind for a man to vote according to his own 
 judgment. It is one of the good results of this elec 
 tion so several thoughtful people have assured rne 
 that more voters will split the ticket this time than 
 ever before. Now, a man who has once broken away 
 from his party will do so again if he thinks right; 
 thus is formed a body of voters who will turn elec 
 tions on their own independent opinion. The nucleus 
 of such a body came with the many Republicans who 
 
BREAKING THE LIQUOR LAW. 61 
 
 voted against the M Kinley tnriff. Now will come an 
 even larger contingent of Democrats, supporters of the 
 gold currency. The creation of such an independent 
 electorate should be a powerful aid to sound govern 
 ment in the future. 
 
 Having got this wrong-end-of-a-telescopic view of 
 an American election, the only diversion left was to 
 break the Maine Liquor Law. It was put into my 
 head by the genial salutation of a gentleman who 
 could only just keep cm hia legs. In Maine, as you 
 know, the buying and selling of alcoholic liquor is 
 unconditionally forbidden under I do not quite know 
 what penalty. I thought I would try to incur that 
 unknown penalty. Bethinking me that the barber is 
 the friend of man, I went in and was shaved. " You 
 can t buy a drink here, I m told," I began. " No," 
 said the barber, stolidly. " I suppose people do, 
 though." " I don t know much about it. I fancy 
 
 there s a druggist or two " Then, as if by a 
 
 powerful effort of memory, " There s a bar right here 
 where you can get it," he said. 
 
 Following his directions I walked down a long 
 passage, and at the back of the house, among sculleries 
 and the like, there was a bar indeed. " Whisky," said 
 I hardily, and whisky it was. It was exceptionally 
 good whisky, and it was no dearer than anywhere else. 
 " Isn t this what they call a Prohibition State ? " I 
 asked. " It s supposed to be," grinned the bar- tender. 
 " But don t the police or somebody come down on 
 
62 A STATE ELECTION. 
 
 you ? " " Now and then they take it in their head to 
 make a fuss." Such is temperance legislation in its 
 chosen seat. It was impossible that this bar, in the 
 very centre of the town, should not be known and 
 used by everybody that cared to know and use it. 
 While I was there a working man came in and bought 
 a bottle of whisky and took it away with him. He 
 remarked ironically that he had dyspepsia ; and I 
 expect he has by now. Thus is the law brought into 
 contempt, and thus I became a criminal. Portland in 
 the New World who knows ? may be for me the 
 first downward stepping - stone to Portland in the 
 Old 
 
63 
 
 VIII. 
 A STATE CONVENTION. 
 
 BUFFALO, September 17. 
 
 THE scenery of Buffalo, to the eye of the fleeting 
 stranger, is not unlike that of Clerkenwell. The 
 houses of one street appear to have fronts to them ; 
 the rest are seemingly all backs. But on the morning 
 of my arrival Buffalo had done its best, or part of its 
 best, to cover up its nakedness. Was it not the seat 
 of the Democratic Convention of the State of New 
 York ? M Kinley and Hobart, Bryan and Sewall, 
 flaunted their familiar features on huge banners, which 
 straddled across the widest streets. All the principal 
 buildings wore American ensigns ; the hotels, head 
 quarters of delegations, were wholly swaddled in them. 
 The streets were full, and in the corridors of the hotels 
 it was as difficult to move as it is in Cheapside on 
 Lord Mayor s Day. " You won t see any Democrats," 
 the host of my hotel at Niagara had sardonically pro 
 mised me on parting ; " you ll see a lot of Anarchists, 
 that s all." I can only say that they were the best 
 
64 A STATE CONVENTION. 
 
 nourished Anarchists I have ever had the privilege of 
 looking on. Tammany Hall the great Democratic 
 order of New York had invaded Buffalo twelve hun 
 dred strong, in six special trains ; had marched in six 
 abreast, with colours flying, and a band and red fire. 
 The Anarchists of Tammany are mainly Irishmen of 
 huge proportions, whether you measure them perpen 
 dicularly or by circumference. In England you would 
 set them down on sight as meat-salesmen from Smith- 
 field ; in America so, at least, I am informed by their 
 enemies they mostly draw handsome salaries from 
 the city or county of New York without making it 
 altogether plain what they do for them. Every Tam 
 many man wore on his ample bosorn a badge some 
 eight inches long ; at the top a silver bar it was gilt 
 at the last Convention, whereby hangs a tale in 
 scribed with the mystic name of Tammany, then a 
 ribbon of the United States colours, and a medallion 
 hanging from that with the picture of an Indian brave. 
 It appears that Tammany plays at being savages, with 
 braves and sachems, just as some of our people play at 
 being knights and dames of chivalry. Then there 
 were the country delegates. Every man carried a 
 badge in his button-hole, and from two to six ribbons, 
 placards, or flowers in his coat. But these wore 
 heavier boots, moved more slowly, spoke less volubly. 
 Most of them wore black broadcloth frock-coats and 
 trousers and black wideawake hats; they looked like 
 village deacons, as I make no doubt they were. 
 
THE DEPRAVITY OF SENATOR HILL. 65 
 
 The four hundred and odd delegates representing 
 the Democrats of a population of some six millions 
 had met, first, to decide the policy on which they 
 would fight the New York State elections as well as 
 the Presidential contest ; and secondly, who should be 
 their candidates. The policy is called the platform, 
 and the list of candidates the ticket. There was 
 a possibility of sharp fighting between the more 
 enthusiastic advocates of Mr Bryan and silver and 
 such Democrats as preserve a hankering after the 
 gold standard. The head of the latter is Senator 
 Hill, an unrivalled political gymnast, who has for 
 many years played a prominent part in the affairs 
 of this State. On the present currency issue he 
 has performed prodigious feats of balancing, and no 
 body himself least of all knows to which side 
 he inclines from day to day. "The spectacle of 
 moral turpitude," as an influential organ here has 
 genially remarked, " which Senator Hill has recently 
 presented affords an exhibition of the depravity of 
 human nature, which goes far to justify the Cal 
 vin istic doctrine of the utter corruption of man." 
 This was no gutter journal, it should be said, but 
 a weekly paper of something the same standing as 
 Black and White, whence may be inferred the fact 
 that political controversy on this side the Atlantic 
 is at least outspoken. Without going so far as this, 
 I had expected at least some lively scenes on the 
 part of the Senator s friends and foes. That I was 
 
 E 
 
66 A STATE CONVENTION. 
 
 disappointed that the Senator did not face the 
 music, that his friends and enemies maintained 
 comparative calm, that the Convention, to be frank, 
 was undeniably tame is unfortunate, but it cannot 
 be laid to my charge. 
 
 The place of meeting was the Buffalo Music Hall. 
 To the Eastern eye it looks like a sort of cross be 
 tween a concert-hall and a suburban mission-room. 
 About a dozen American ensigns were disposed 
 about the stage, and there were two portraits of 
 Bryan and one of Sewall. I have yet to meet, by 
 the way, anybody who takes the least interest in 
 Sewall. The decorations as a whole, I was assured, 
 were painfully inadequate to the occasion, The 
 gallery was crowded with spectators, but the leaders 
 on the stage and the delegates on the floor were 
 deplorably unpunctual. The truth was, so the 
 Democratic papers said, that this was a delegates 
 convention not a cut-and-dried, boss-ridden affair, 
 where the representatives from the local organisa 
 tions had nothing to do but say " Ay " to a motion 
 given out from the chair. The delegates were them 
 selves to decide on the platform and the ticket. 
 The result was that the delegates worthy souls 
 believing this, had sat up so late the night be 
 fore talking, talking, talking about what they would 
 do, that they found it quite impossible to come to 
 the hall and do it until an hour over time the next 
 morning. By that time they had all straggled in 
 
POPULAR ORATORY. 67 
 
 and laboriously sorted themselves according to their 
 counties, and the proceedings began. 
 
 The larikest chairman of modern times was duly 
 elected, and delivered a long address on the Silver 
 question. Without doubt the Silver question is 
 technically the one issue of this campaign ; every 
 speech dealt with it, just as every conversation you 
 overhear in a train or the street is dealing with 
 it. It is not an invigorating subject for a popular 
 harangue. "To annul either of the metals as 
 money is to abridge the quantity of the circulat 
 ing medium," is hardly the sentence you would ex 
 pect to set popular passion aflame, any more than 
 the chorus, "We ll eradicate the gold-bugs with our 
 16 to 1," is the ideal of a rousing political song. 
 On the other hand, this whole nation s attention is 
 concentrated on business and money -making to a 
 degree almost incredible even to an Englishman, 
 while the very high average of its intelligence 
 guides it through mazes of abstruse financial argu 
 ment which would hopelessly befog the ordinary 
 English voter. Yet this chairman s speech, as well 
 as a dozen or so others I heard, were very admirable 
 popular oratory, judge them by what standard you 
 will. Perhaps they recalled the street preacher a 
 little, in matter, in intonation, in delivery. The 
 speakers, like the ordinary preacher, dealt very ex 
 tensively in vain repetitions. But then you must 
 the hall was a very large one, and it| 
 
68 A STATE CONVENTION. 
 
 was difficult for any voice to carry in it. The repe 
 tition is meant to catch the ears that the first state 
 ment escaped. 
 
 It struck me as rather curious that the Convention 
 endured patiently the unending reproduction of argu 
 ments that every man must have read twice a-day in 
 the public press for the American is seldom without 
 a newspaper in his hand. But I concluded that he 
 does not want his public speakers to instruct him. 
 He wants to be amused, tickled, flogged up to enthusi 
 asm. That, with the size of the normal American 
 public meeting, has produced a far more declamatory 
 kind of rhetoric than we know at home. Every 
 speaker gesticulates freely and with ease and effect. 
 Biblical allusions, which would be profane among us, 
 are received, in all good faith, with clapping of hands. 
 One speaker turned in an impassioned apostrophe to 
 the picture of Mr Bryan, which hung at the wings. 
 " O, William Jennings Bryan ! " he cried, lifting both 
 hands as if in adoration. An English audience would 
 have choked with laughter ; here it was a very telling 
 point. No doubt the necessity of talking to an 
 audience so large that it is a constant strain to be 
 heard, crushes out the finer effects of oratory. It 
 leads to the use of very long - sustained sentences, 
 difficult to follow, and leaving their impression rather 
 on the emotions than the reason. Yet nobody can 
 either hear or read even such ordinary, everyday 
 
A SCENE. 69 
 
 speeches as those of the Buffalo Convention without 
 allowing them real dignity and eloquence. 
 
 After the chairman s speech came the platform, 
 submitted by the committee that had drawn it up. 
 It supported the Chicago Convention and the Bryan 
 candidature. It freely charged its opponents in the 
 State Legislature with the grossest corruption and any 
 other vices it could lay its pen to. It made an ingeni 
 ous bid for the cyclist vote which must be prodigious 
 here by pressing for better roads. On this question 
 of the platform arose a promising gust of disorder. 
 When it was put to the meeting there arose as 
 appeared from the gallery a broad, black-coated back, 
 a wagging bald head, and an Irish accent, raised in 
 vigorous protest. In an instant every delegate and 
 most spectators sprang up some to their feet, some to 
 their seats and whooped " No, no," " Sit down," " Yes, 
 yes," " Turn him out," " Let him speak." In the midst 
 of which the back and head were reinforced by an 
 upraised arm, brandishing the Bryan revolving fan 
 silver-foil, price 10 cents until the fan part flew off 
 towards the ceiling, leaving the ineffective stump be 
 hind. The nape of the neck began to get purple 
 surely, thought I, here is the malign influence of 
 Senator Hill at last. But alas ! no. It appeared that 
 this gentleman merely demanded a poll, and when 
 the poll was taken it appeared that he had written 
 a speech explaining his vote. And when he had made 
 
70 A STATE CONVENTION. 
 
 his speech he announced what the speech had wholly 
 ignored that he was going to vote just the same way 
 as everybody else. He affably acknowledged that he 
 did not believe in free silver. But then, he said, the 
 best experts differed on the subject, and would con 
 tinue to differ. Should he separate himself from the 
 party of Democracy for a trifle like that? Never! 
 Everybody applauded the sentiment, and I wondered 
 what, then, was he voting for. 
 
 Then came the nomination of the Convention s can 
 didate for Governor. The choice lay between gen 
 tlemen of the names of Thacher and Sulzer, with an 
 outsider named Porter to make the running. " How 
 could we go back to Jefferson County," asked the 
 nominator of Mr Porter, in plaintive apology, "and 
 tell our people that we had failed to put him in 
 nomination ? " But the real battle was obviously 
 between Messrs Thacher and Sulzer. The latter is 
 the younger and the more ardent advocate of free 
 silver; at every mention of his name his partisans 
 flung hats and handkerchiefs, newspapers and um 
 brellas, into the air. Mr Thacher, it appeared, had 
 only a few months ago publicly warned an audience 
 against letting the selfish interests of the owners of 
 silver bullion lead them from the safe path of mono 
 metallism. Yet and this was very significant it 
 was assumed that, whatever his personal opinions, he 
 would " loyally " support free coinage, because the 
 Convention had declared in favour of it. The Diving 
 
A STAMPEDE. 71 
 
 Eight of the Majority was formulated almost in set 
 terms. Not merely that the majority will have its 
 way, and that on the whole it ought to have its way ; 
 that every intelligent Englishman believes. But also 
 that he is no true Democrat who maintains his own 
 opinion in the teeth of it : this is democracy double- 
 dyed indeed. 
 
 Hard on the top of this theory fell the strangely 
 ironical conclusion. The voting began. The chair 
 man read the roll of delegates by counties, and the 
 chief delegate answered how many votes the county 
 gave for each candidate. At first Sulzer led plainly 
 he was the choice of the rural voters. Presently, 
 " New York," called the chairman. Then uprose the 
 leader of Tammany John C. Sheehan is his eloquent 
 name. " New York : John Boyd Thacher, one hun 
 dred and five votes." Tammany had voted solid to a 
 man. Sulzer himself, hailing from New York city, 
 was constrained to give his voice for his opponent. 
 With a hundred and five votes out of four hundred and 
 forty at a mouthful, Thacher was as good as elected. 
 Then came a curious sequel yet not so curious, 
 either, to those who have noticed the ways of either 
 beasts or men in masses. Nearly all the agricultural 
 voters now gave sheepish and rather shamefaced suf 
 frages to Thacher. The Convention, in the expressive 
 native phrase, was stampeded. It was to be the dele 
 gates unbossed Convention and Mr John C. Sheehan 
 controlled it with his little finger. The system of 
 
72 A STATE CONVENTION. 
 
 voting by roll-call left no man any reasonable chance 
 of concealing the side he took ; the eye of the boss 
 was upon him. So Mr Thacher is to stand for gov 
 ernor, and experts see in this the Machiavelian hand 
 of the depraved Senator Hill aforesaid. Yet it seems 
 that Mr Thacher must support Silver, though per 
 sonally he prefers Gold. He must vote for Silver 
 because the majority that chose him vote for Silver. 
 And the majority chose him because Mr Sheehan 
 told it to. So that it works out at this: that the 
 political opinions of Mr John B. Thacher are formed 
 by Mr John C. Sheehan. A strange paradox for the 
 freest democracy on earth 1 
 
IX. 
 
 NIAGARA. 
 
 WASHINGTON, September 10. 
 
 THE dominant and overmastering impression of Niagara 
 is water. Water everywhere you turn, before and 
 behind, underfoot and descending in showers from 
 overhead. To approach it is to be moistened through 
 your whole body, and to walk round it is a liberal 
 water-cure. Here in Washington, with the thermo 
 meter marking I was going to say a cool 94 in the 
 shade: that would be misleading a hot 94 in the 
 shade, I sit and pant for Niagara. It is a universe 
 of water. Miles of water, fathoms of water, tons of 
 water, water rushing at incalculable speed, water 
 hurled with irresistible force, water purling, swish 
 ing, roaring, water diving into the abyss, water leap 
 ing up to heaven. Finally, water turning an electric 
 wheel. 
 
 The great merit of Niagara as a cataract is its acces 
 sibility from every distance and every point of view. 
 Knowing itself to be the greatest thing on earth, it 
 
74 NIAGARA. 
 
 has hospitably laid itself out to be inspected from 
 every part, from far or near, to be seen, heard, and 
 felt in its aspects of beauty as in its attributes of 
 awfulness. The Niagara river runs northward from 
 the eastern corner of Lake Erie to the western corner 
 of Lake Ontario. Just above the Falls it finds the 
 rocky mass of Goat Island barring its way; after 
 this its bed turns sharply to the right. Half of it 
 leaps down on the American side; the other half 
 turns the corner of the Island on the Canadian side, 
 and drops in the vast crescent of the Horseshoe Falls. 
 The two are, roughly, at right angles one to another. 
 From the suspension bridge which spans the gorge 
 of the river below the Falls, or from the Canadian 
 side, you can see the two together: the American 
 Falls and the huge red - brown precipice of Goat 
 Island form one side of a parallelogram, the Horse 
 shoe Falls another. Seen thus, there is nothing 
 terrible about Niagara just white walls of water 
 and white floating clouds of spray. Over the lip 
 of the Horseshoe Falls the stream curls in an arc 
 of the most wondrous, lustrous green, such as never 
 was, and never could be, put on canvas. Down in 
 the wide basin below, the river seems sluggish and 
 weary after its buffeting. Steamers puff along right 
 under the precipices of rock and water. Every tree 
 and blade of grass, even now, is green with the fresh 
 est, coolest green of spring. Under a dying sun and 
 a pale blue sky, with a fleecy moon riding over the 
 
THE AMERICAN RAPIDS. 75 
 
 brink of the Horseshoe Falls, Niagara was a place 
 to day-dream and forget there is any such thing as 
 noise and effort in the world. The scene that could 
 so beguile you after New York and the Buffalo Con 
 vention may call itself a miracle of nature with good 
 title. 
 
 For Niagara in tumult you must go to the American 
 side. Here again the generous cataract offers all 
 kindness to its wooers. Above the Falls the broad 
 river is broken into miles of leaping, seething rapids ; 
 and I am not sure but this is the most romantic part 
 of the whole wonder. Everybody knows what a little 
 rapid looks like ; there are dozens of them on the 
 Lynn, for example, or almost any stream in hill 
 country. This is a great waste of desolate black 
 tormented water. Here and there it flings up into 
 white foam as it is struck back from a rock. Then 
 it is pitched forward again, then aside into a quiet 
 eddy, only to drive forward on to the rocks once 
 more. As it sweeps down on the American Falls 
 it has a moment s peace. There is an embanked 
 corner so close to the edge that you may stand, and, 
 turning your head to the left, see a limpid stream 
 swift, but not astonishingly swift flowing by at 
 your feet. You turn to the right and there is 
 nothing but empty air. Where has the river dis 
 appeared to ? Then you look down and see it, sunk 
 underground, as it were, and changed from racing 
 black to sluggish green. And the border between 
 
76 NIAGARA. 
 
 these two fields of vision is just one long white line, 
 where the water breaks into foam as it slides over 
 the edge. 
 
 All this only concerns the look and the sound of 
 the water. You can see the green and the black 
 and the white ; you can hear the strong rustle of the 
 Eapids and the roar of the Falls. But if you want 
 to feel Niagara, then go down to the Cave of the 
 Winds. The Cave of the Winds is not really a cave 
 at all, but what it lacks in cave it makes up in wind. 
 It is really a path close under the base of the preci 
 pice over which the American Fall flings itself. As 
 the river descends it is naturally thrown forward and 
 outward from the face of the rock. Thus it leaves 
 a little passage between the two walls of rock and 
 water, along which it is possible to walk. You pay 
 your dollar, strip off every rag of your clothes, lock 
 up your watch and money in a box, sling the key 
 round your neck, put on a suit of oilskin and list 
 slippers, and down you go. First you descend a 
 spiral wooden stair, which runs down the face of the 
 cliff. Then you come out into daylight on a ridge 
 under Goat Island. Immediately little dribblets of 
 Niagara begin to run over your head and down your 
 neck. Turn a sharp corner, and there is the Fall, 
 sweeping from the height above with a deafening 
 roar and a blinding spume, hardly a couple of yards 
 in front of you. Just beyond the spot where it 
 alights are some huge rocks; from one to another 
 
THE CAVE OF THE WINDS. 77 
 
 of these climbs a series of frail wooden bridges and 
 stairways leading right across the face of the Fall. 
 That is the way to the Cave of the Winds. Drenched 
 in blinding spray, you walk, or slither, along them. 
 Of course, they are streaming wet, and overgrown 
 with slimy water-weeds. Thus you pass right in 
 front of the Fall and look up at it. It glides swiftly 
 and without effort over the brink, and breaks itself 
 into clouds of spray as it beats with a hoarse grinding 
 roar on the rocks. You look and look. Down, down 
 it comes, and loud, loud it thunders. There comes 
 over you a wild craving for silence, and unconsciously 
 you wait for it to stop and give you time to pull 
 yourself together. Only by degrees so dazed and 
 stupid the sublimity of it leaves you do you realise 
 that Niagara never stops; that it has never stopped 
 one second since the water first burst its way through 
 the rock to the gorge below, and that it will go 
 crashing down like this hour by hour, year by year, 
 century by century for ever. 
 
 Then you go down more slippery steps to the Cave. 
 These land you on a shelf at the base of the sheer 
 rock a sort of twelve-inch beach lashed by a furious 
 sea of waterfall. But that lashing waterfall is the 
 Cave, and you have got to go through it. All take 
 hands; then, with the guide leading, you push into 
 the most awful rain-storm that you ever dreamed of 
 in your most extravagant dream. The only thing 
 comparable to it is being out of your depth in the 
 
78 NIAGARA. 
 
 sea before you have learned to swim. You are in 
 the grip of the water, and all of a sudden you feel 
 what a tiny, puny, impotent insect you are. You 
 can t see, you can t hear, you can t breathe. You 
 can just make shift to struggle on to oppose what 
 silly little fight you can against the unconquerable 
 might of the water. Your silly little effort just pulls 
 you through. You come out the other side into the 
 sunlight with a gasp, scramble up a few steps, and 
 look back. Is that all ? Was it only that little bit 
 of a garden watering-pot that you came through ? 
 It looks the simplest thing in the world. Only if 
 that little bit knocked the breath and the senses and 
 the mind out of you, as it did, you can just begin to 
 form some idea what must be the matchless force of 
 the whole thing. 
 
 Then you dress and go back to your hotel feeling 
 very clean and rather played out, as if you had had 
 a long swim. The rest of your time you will do well 
 to spend merely loafing up and down by the shore. 
 The town of Niagara Falls is a delight after cities 
 like New York and Buffalo, or even Boston. One 
 wide street with electric tram-cars, and the rest pave 
 ments of plank (to keep you out of the wet), trees, 
 grass, coolness, and quiet. You may pass again on 
 to the new suspension bridge ; and, turning there to 
 look down the river, you will see factories on the 
 brow of the cliff, and dipping down to the green 
 blotchy eddies the longest and fattest and most ver- 
 
THE WATER-PIPE, THE WHEEL, AND THE CHIMNEY. 79 
 
 inilion water-pipe you ever saw. Or else you can 
 go and look at the huge wheel which develops electric 
 power for millions of people. Or else you can stroll 
 out to take a last look at the American Rapids as 
 they toss and writhe and madden under the moon. 
 Out of the light fretwork of trees that marks the 
 Canadian bank the waves seem to sweep down on 
 you like tortured souls. Turn again, and up the 
 river there shoots, seemingly from their very midst, 
 a tall factory chimney, and belches into the still air 
 a torrent of the foulest soot in the world. Are we 
 not in America? 
 
80 
 
 WILLIAM J. BRYAN : DEMAGOGUE. 
 
 WASHINGTON, September 20. 
 
 HITHERTO it has been the tradition that the candi 
 date for the Presidency should sit at home in dignity t 
 while others conduct the campaign on his behalf. 
 Deputations of voters may come to him, but he 
 must not go to them. Mr Bryan has changed all 
 that to the disgust of his opponents, who find 
 his provincial starring tours unworthy of the high 
 office he sues for; and to the equal delight of 
 the mass of his supporters in the country. He 
 moves from State to State, addressing a mass meet 
 ing here, offering a few remarks at a wayside station 
 there, with more than Gladstonian industry. In 
 the course of his pilgrimage he arrived yesterday at 
 Washington. 
 
 When I walked down to the station five minutes 
 before his train was due, I found it dense with men 
 and women, white, whitey-brown, and black, who over 
 flowed into the streets. In a torrid wind that fanned 
 
AT THE STATION. 81 
 
 them lazily off the baked bricks and pavements, they 
 waited with a crowd s usual mixture of expectancy 
 and listlessness. A large force of police, on foot and 
 mounted, kept the street clear : by way of precaution 
 they had brought a white and grey van, which I take 
 to be the American equivalent of Black Maria. "I 
 suppose they re going to take Bryan away in that," 
 remarked a ^Republican cynic. The police of this 
 country have not the best of reputations for tact, but 
 these Washington men did their duty admirably. 
 " Why don t ye get on to the side walk ? " pleaded a 
 persuasive mounted Irishman. " Ye ll have to do ut ; 
 why don t ye do ut when I tell ye ? Ye ll all see 
 him." " See him for four years yet," sang out a 
 gentleman with a twelve-inch crimson confession of 
 Democracy streaming from his coat. In the moments 
 of waiting there trickled along a discussion of the 
 usual Silver question. This being the political capital 
 of the Union, the inhabitants are disfranchised, and 
 the mass of them appear to know and care very little 
 about the subject. Most of them seem to think that 
 if Bryan gets in they will somehow get more silver, 
 and if M Kinley gets in they will somehow get some 
 gold and if all I hear of electoral methods is true, 
 their expectation is not wholly unwarranted. " I m 
 for gold," said a yellow man ; " I don t want fifty 
 cents instead of a dollar." " Why, we ve got silver," 
 said a cabman, as he pulled out a dime, " and we ve 
 got paper," producing a dollar. " What s Bryan mak- 
 
 F 
 
WILLIAM J. BRYAN: DEMAGOGUE. 
 
 ing all the fuss about ? " The cogent argument had a 
 great success. 
 
 From inside the station arose a piercing sound, 
 something between a whoop and a scream. This 
 was the American cheer. Our cheer is produced by 
 people shouting in unison ; the American by the com 
 bination of an infinite number of short, discordant 
 noises. The difference is not, perhaps, without its 
 analogy to national character. Ours is the more 
 disciplined, and falls the more roundly on the ear, 
 but to convey a head-splitting impression of enthusiasm 
 their method is the more direct and effective. 
 
 There was a trembling in the crowd by the door. 
 An open carriage with four horses and two colossal 
 negroes in livery swung up to the pavement. Next 
 moment William J. Bryan was standing bareheaded 
 inside it. A compact, black -coated figure, a clean 
 shaven, clear - cut face, a large, sharp nose, and a 
 square mouth and jaw. With the faint blue stubble 
 on his face, and his long grizzly hair, he suggests an 
 actor to the English mind. But you could not mis 
 take him for a bad actor. Cheers ran out down the 
 street, and hats flew in the air ; and so he drove oft 
 serene and upright, pleased but not surprised, with a 
 smile on his lips and a light in his eye the very type 
 of a great demagogue. 
 
 Not necessarily a demagogue in any reproachful 
 sense. Demagogue means leader of the people, and 
 you may lead the people by straight ways or crooked 
 
IN THE PARK. 83 
 
 to good destinies or bad. In a free country every 
 politician must be something of a demagogue. Disraeli 
 and Gladstone were both finished demagogues, and 
 until we have two more great demagogues in England 
 politics will continue to be as ditch-water. As for 
 Mr Bryan, not one questioning word have I ever 
 heard as to the purity of his motives. And in this 
 country, where charges of gross corruption are volleyed 
 to and fro across the net of party politics until you 
 wonder what has become of the law of libel, the 
 absence of accusation may be taken as conclusive 
 proof of innocence. But demagogue one who knows 
 how to lead the people and who enjoys it he is from 
 the crown of his thinning hair to the dust of travel 
 on his boots. 
 
 I wandered up to the park, where the great meet 
 ing was to be held, and drifted into the crowd. The 
 platform was built in front of a large stage, whereon 
 sat perhaps a thousand people. It was draped with 
 bunting, flags flew from every corner, and it was 
 festooned with hundreds of incandescent lights. 
 Along to the speaker s left was another stand. Afc 
 one end of this a brazen - lunged band punctuated 
 the speeches with "Shouting out the battle-cry of 
 freedom," and similar appropriate airs. In front of 
 the platform was massed the dense company, about 
 ten thousand strong : this was not an extraordinarily 
 large meeting for America. Out of the sea of soft 
 felt hats rose an occasional club banner, and parts of 
 
84 WILLIAM J. BRYAN: DEMAGOGUE. 
 
 the crowd were as thick with American ensigns as a 
 wheat-field with poppies. A speaker was declaiming 
 with vigour and eloquence from the platform, but the 
 crowd took not the least notice. In the pauses of 
 their conversation they occasionally caught a phrase, 
 and whooped commending! y. But they were not 
 there to hear arguments; they were there to hear 
 Bryan, and Bryan at the moment was dining. Now 
 and again an enthusiast threw into the air a sheaf of 
 bills, bearing the opinions of Abraham Lincoln on the 
 money-power, and the ominous hot wind, which was 
 plainly bringing up a thunderstorm, distributed them 
 over the crowd. The crowd was only languidly in 
 terested in free silver, but it was down on the money- 
 power. That is the kernel of this election. It is the 
 first stirring of a huge revolt against plutocracy 
 against the trusts and rings that take their toll out" 
 of every man s every dollar. Free silver happens to 
 be the hall-mark of revolt, but free copper or free 
 mercury or free arsenic would do just as well 
 
 Suddenly, above the periods of the orator and the 
 whistling of the wind, the band crashed out " See the 
 conquering hero comes." Instantly the whole park 
 awoke. A forest of little American flags sprang up 
 on the stand and waved furiously. A deafening 
 scream went up from the whole ground. " Unfurl," 
 said a voice at my elbow ; I looked up, and behold 
 I was standing under the flaunting standard of the 
 North Carolina Bryan Club. I felt the position was 
 
BRYAN SPEAKS. 85 
 
 a false one the more so when the staff snapped in 
 the wind and the banner extinguished me; but no 
 body had leisure to think of such things. The mass 
 of heads and flags in the stand was still heaving 
 tumultuously ; it took the candidate a matter of 
 minutes to swim through to the platform, yet the 
 piercing quality of the shrieking never varied. Then 
 he appeared, calm but radiant. Ten thousand hats 
 flew in the air ten thousand and one, counting mine, 
 which with the stolidity of my race I merely waved 
 and the screams rose yet more shrilly. A little 
 girl in silver tripped along the platform rail, and pre 
 sented a bunch of silver roses. The shrieks became 
 delirium. For a moment the square, black figure 
 stood absolutely still. Then slowly he reached forth 
 the hand, like St Paul in the Bible. The din went 
 on unabated. Still very slowly, he raised an arm above 
 his head and made passes one, two, three in each 
 direction of the crowd. Gradually silence crept over 
 the mass of heads, and then the orator opened his lips. 
 In a voice low but plain, hoarse but very rich, he 
 began. He was glad to see once more those among 
 whom he had spent four years of official life. " We ll 
 give you four years more," shrieked my friend from 
 the station. A broad and winning smile broke over 
 the candidate s mouth, and again the mob screamed. 
 A most admirable demagogue ! " That s smart," said 
 a little man behind me ; " did ye see how it made him 
 laugh?" Everybody saw; everybody was meant to 
 
86 WILLIAM J. BRYAN : DEMAGOGUE. 
 
 see. Then again, when rain began to fall, somebody 
 held up an umbrella over the orator s head. The 
 wind blew it inside out. But the orator crammed a 
 broad felt hat on to his head, turned up his coat collar 
 with a sturdy gesture, and then spread out his arms to 
 his hearers. Once more they cracked their throats 
 with applause. " They won t get him down from 
 there so easy," cried a delighted elector. Nature 
 herself, turned gold-bug, was powerless to deter the 
 people s hero from his mission. 
 
 As for the matter of the speech, why trouble to 
 inquire about it? It reads well in this morning s 
 newspaper, but I thought it smacked of platitude and 
 tautology. Certainly it was most effectively delivered, 
 and telling gestures drove every point hard home. 
 But the matter twas no matter what he said. They 
 had come to see and hear, but not to reason. Each 
 man was more concerned to set his own little radius 
 laughing with a smart bit of comment than to hear 
 what the man they cheered had to say. " Did ye see 
 him ? " was the question one put to another not 
 " What did he say ? " Both for good and evil, the free 
 American citizen is no disciple of anybody ; it would 
 take a smart man to teach him. So the whole meeting 
 was just a spectacular effect. And nobody knew and 
 acted on that truth better than William J. Bryan. 
 
 Then came the storm. First a clap of thunder, then 
 a cloud of dust, then flag-staves cracking, and finally 
 such a fusilade pj: heavy raindrops as England never 
 
THE DEMAGOGUE AT WORK. 87 
 
 sees. Three-quarters of the audience took to their 
 heels like a routed army. The rest squatted down 
 close to the ground in bunches of two or three under 
 an umbrella, till the park might have been dotted with 
 toads under toadstools. Minute by minute the pitiless 
 downpour went on. Then the remaining quarter split 
 asunder from the centre. " He s gone ! " and in fifteen 
 seconds the park was as bare as if Bryan never had 
 been. But as I splashed home I saw the four-horsed 
 carriage, with the nodding helmets of mounted police, 
 driving rapidly off, with a further running, yelling 
 escort of devotees. And I saw the black, square 
 figure turn from side to side, buoyant and elastic, 
 glad and exultant over the popular applause. A bora 
 demagogue, if I ever saw one ! 
 
XL 
 
 THE CAPITAL AND THE CAPITOL. 
 
 WASHINGTON, September 21, 
 
 THE United States are trying the biggest experiment 
 in Government that the world has ever seen or is 
 ever likely to see. It has been going on now for 
 well over a hundred years, and I do not suppose it 
 will be completed for at least a hundred years more. 
 The experiment is to find out whether a tract of 
 populated country so vast that it takes five days 
 incessant travel to go from one end of it to another 
 can be made into a nation ; and if so, under what 
 form of government ? People in Europe, and for 
 that matter in America too, are apt to conclude that 
 the experiment is complete and has succeeded. I 
 do not think so. It has, indeed, been astonishingly 
 successful, but it is not yet more than half complete. 
 West of the Mississippi and the Missouri, the country 
 is pegged out, and to some extent peopled ; but in 
 the next hundred years the mere natural increase 
 of population, to say nothing of immigration, will 
 
EAST AND WEST. 89 
 
 probably throw the centre of gravity nearer Chicago 
 than New York. At present the West is dependent 
 both politically and economically upon the East ; when 
 it becomes self-sufficing the situation will be very 
 different. 
 
 The present election has, of course, a most impor 
 tant bearing on the ultimate outcome of the experi 
 ment. For the first time the East and West find, 
 or believe they find, their interests sharply and dia 
 metrically opposed. And I own it does not appear 
 to me the best of augury for the ultimate unity of 
 this country that each side appears more set on 
 beating down the opponent than on trying to con 
 ciliate his interests with its own. I have not noticed, 
 for instance, that the Eepublicans have put out dny 
 alternative policy to relieve Western agriculture, nor 
 that the Democrats have devised any expedient in 
 the event of their success to break the fall of Eastern 
 business. That any serious danger of disruption is 
 involved in the success of either party I have met 
 nobody who will admit. "We are a sentimental 
 people," said the most statesmanlike of New York 
 editors to me, " and we are an excitable people, but 
 we have our share of common-sense. With the line 
 of cleavage drawn so deep and so long before the 
 election day, I do not think we shall lose our heads 
 whatever happens." On the other side I put the 
 less responsible opinion of a manufacturer of fur 
 niture and an exporter of it to Glasgow, too, if it 
 
90 THE CAPITAL AND THE CAPITOL. 
 
 comes to that whom I met in the train near Buffalo. 
 He was an American such as I have long dreamed 
 of nearer 6 feet 6 inches than 6 feet, wiry, parch 
 ment-skinned, clean shaven but for the grizzled chin- 
 beard, with long yellow teeth, and a humorous blue 
 eye. " I tell you, sir," he said, " when once the people 
 begin fixing the coinage for themselves they will never 
 let go of it again. If Bryan wins, the bankers will 
 call every loan, and every mortgage will be called 
 as it falls due. Business will go to hell, sir, and there 
 will be trouble." Trouble or not, I do not admire 
 the way the two sides guard themselves from trying 
 to understand the position of the other. 
 
 But what have these generalities to do with Wash 
 ington ? Not much, I admit. Yet it is because of 
 the peculiar nature of the experiment in Government 
 of which I speak that Washington exists at all. It 
 is fairly plain that this huge country cannot be cen 
 tralised in a capital as England or France are central 
 ised. You want a vast deal of local self-government 
 to keep Maine and South Carolina and Oregon in 
 the same nation. Accordingly there is a deal, and 
 a vast deal, of local patriotism for the local Govern 
 ment to brace itself against. One of its results 
 I should say a deplorable one is that a man may 
 only sit in Congress for the constituency in which 
 he actually lives. The ablest statesman in the world, 
 if he is defeated in his own home, is temporarily lost 
 to his country. No doubt the carpet-bagger has his 
 
AN ARTIFICIAL CAPITAL. 91 
 
 demerits, but so surely has this opposite system. 
 It stifles good men, and does nothing to discourage 
 sectional exclusiveness. It is another result of this 
 local sentiment, not to say mutual local antagonism, 
 that the federal capital could be fixed in no existing 
 important city. Philadelphia would not endure New 
 York, and New York would never send her repre 
 sentatives to Philadelphia; New Jersey would have 
 nothing to do with either, and the South snapped its 
 fingers at all three. So the district of Columbia was 
 carved out of Maryland to the extent of ten square 
 miles, the capital was laid out by a French engineer, 
 the Capitol was planned by a West Indian architect, 
 and the city of Washington arose. Its inhabitants 
 were and remain disfranchised ; why, I cannot alto 
 gether see. It can hardly be because they supply dry 
 goods and groceries to representatives and senators, 
 and might thereby be corrupted. If that is the reason, 
 why not disfranchise all senators grocers as such ? 
 Senators have grocers at home as well as at Washing 
 ton : here, moreover, one senator s grocery bill might 
 reasonably be expected to balance and neutralise 
 another s. 
 
 There is one very obvious inconvenience in having 
 several capitals to a country. Here is New York, the 
 business capital ; Washington, the political capital ; and 
 Boston, the intellectual capital this is denied, by the 
 way, outside of Boston and so on. Now if you want 
 to find a man of any mark in England or France, you 
 
92 THE CAPITAL AND THE CAPITOL. 
 
 go to London or Paris, and in a short while he is certain 
 to come under your hand. Not so here. You want a 
 man in New York : lie is occupied with his political 
 duties in Washington. You want him in Washington: 
 he has gone to New York to look after his business. 
 Why the deuce can t he do the two things in the same 
 place ? you ask yourself at last. 
 
 But when you reach Washington you forget every 
 thing in delight at the charm of the place. There is 
 an impression of comfort, of leisure, of space to spare, 
 of stateliness that you hardly expected in America. 
 It looks a sort of place where nobody has to work for 
 his living, or, at any rate, not hard. If Washington 
 were in Germany, instead of a fair-sized slice of Ger 
 many being in Washington, it would be called a " Resi- 
 denz Stadt." That is just what it is a seat of Govern 
 ment, laid out for the ease and dignity of the governors. 
 Its plan reflects the greatest credit on its French en 
 gineer, who plainly had not forgotten Versailles in the 
 land of the stranger. In theory the Capitol is the centre 
 of the city. From it radiate four streets in plain fact 
 there are only three, but though the fourth does not 
 meet the eye, it exists for topographic purposes just as 
 truly as does the Equator which divide the city into 
 four quarters, north-east, north-west, south-east, south 
 west. Within these divisions the streets are ticketed 
 off on the American method, those running East and 
 West being lettered A Street, B Street, and so on, 
 
DIGNIFIED WASHINGTON. 93 
 
 while those running North and South are numbered 
 1st Street, 2d Street, 3d Street. 
 
 But this method, though full of convenience, is apt 
 to leave a city with very little more character and 
 beauty than the gridiron which it resembles. Accord 
 ingly, the ingenious designer has intersected this 
 arrangement with broad avenues, running at various 
 angles to the squares. Cunningly taking advantage 
 of slight inequalities of the ground, this expedient has 
 produced some of the finest streets and widest pros 
 pects in the world. Washington, moreover, is the best 
 planted city I have ever rested my eyes on. Looking 
 out from the summit of the Capitol, you realise the 
 extraordinary liberality with which the city has been 
 planned. Almost every street in the network has its 
 double row of fine trees. In all other cities seen from 
 above the note of colour is struck by the roofs; in 
 Washington slate roofs and red bricks are alike 
 swallowed up in green. 
 
 Another sight of great refreshment, to the foreign 
 eye is furnished by the public buildings. Dating for 
 the most part from the end of last century or the 
 early part of this, they are built in a chaste and classic 
 style instinct with dignity and refinement. For in 
 terest and effect, I confess, I would ten times sooner 
 look at the vigorous uncouthness of New York. Yet 
 after this Washington affords a comfortable recoil. 
 The White House, with its Corinthian pillars, its even 
 
94 THE CAPITAL AND THE CAPITOL. 
 
 rows of large windows, its flat balustraded roof, might 
 almost be a great English mansion of the last century. 
 The Treasury and the Post Office have the same Ionic 
 columns; and the Patent Office is much like the 
 British Museum, only clean. 
 
 But the star of Washington is the Capitol. It may 
 be roughly described as like the National Gallery 
 flanked with a Koyal Exchange on each side, and with 
 the dome of St Paul s stuck on top. This is only a 
 very rough working description, and is far from doing 
 the Capitol justice. It stands on a low hill which you 
 ascend by broad flights of stone steps. Then it is 
 girdled with tier on tier of stone terraces, and this 
 setting keeps its great length and height from breaking 
 out of proportion. Though it has been built wing by 
 wing, extension by extension for over a hundred years, 
 the parts all combine into one harmony. None crushes 
 out the other, and by reason of the harmony the huge 
 mass is as light and graceful as any toy temple in a 
 pleasure-ground. Yet with all its gracefulness, the 
 Capitol is very majestic. It would be a king of build 
 ings in any city ; it is doubly regal in Washington. 
 For plainly the capital is built for the Capitol ; not the 
 Capitol for the capital. It is the Capitol s own city, 
 laid out at its feet to do it honour and to enhance its 
 lordliness. Broad sweeps of public garden, long vistas 
 of spacious avenue, white outlines of vassal public 
 offices grouped round it the whole city is the setting 
 
THE SEAL OF UNITY. 95 
 
 for this shining jewel. Each city of America is 
 stamped with its own individuality ; the Capitol is the 
 seal of the unity of them all. 
 
 Will the seal be strong enough to bind them ? Will 
 this still stand as the one Capitol, without rival or 
 second, in the year 2000? Who knows? 
 
96 
 
 XIL 
 
 IN THE SOUTH. 
 
 WELMIKOTOH, N. C. , September 24. 
 
 YES; beyond question I was in the South. That 
 truth was established by ten able-bodied niggers 
 struggling for a single hand-bag. As I sauntered 
 down the main street of Wilmington the fact was 
 gradually stamped upon my brain beyond possibility 
 of mistake. They had told me that Wilmington was 
 not real South : for that you must go down to New 
 Orleans or Texas. No doubt New Orleans is of a 
 richer southern dye than Wilmington. But to go to 
 New Orleans and back from Washington is a matter 
 of days, whereas Wilmington is but a paltry twelve 
 hours away, which means almost next door in America. 
 And Wilmington, after all, is in North Carolina, an 
 indisputably Southern State. Here is a river of thick 
 yellow ochre, dawdling between low, swampy, tree- 
 grown banks, where they were shipping cotton. Here 
 is a population wherein the blacks outnumber the 
 whites. Was not Wilmington a notable resort of the 
 
THE UNTIDY SOUTH. 97 
 
 blockade runners ? Cotton, niggers, and blockade run 
 ners what more Southern can you want than that ? 
 
 Here, moreover, was the true Southern atmosphere 
 the sun and dirt, and the imperative necessity to 
 saunter, which you cannot but feel and yield to, 
 whether you come on it down the Rhone or over 
 the Alps, across the Danube or by the Atlantic Coast 
 liailroad from Washington. Once you have known it 
 you cannot miss it again. There had been a smart 
 frost in the morning, yet the sun and air of Wilming 
 ton exhaled a languor which had been wanting in the 
 greater heat of New York. Here were barefooted 
 children, white, and black, and brown. All the shops 
 had awnings, with the greater part of the stock hang 
 ing from pegs and rails outside ; all the shopkeepers 
 were lounging out on the pavement. Along the prin 
 cipal street stout brick buildings elbowed little one- 
 storeyed wooden shanties, slowly dropping to pieces. 
 Most of the houses were of wood the better sort 
 painted, the worse going to be painted some day, if 
 there was any of them still left, when somebody felt 
 equal to it. Even the finest houses, with green blinds 
 rigidly shut on the sun, with shady trees, palnis, and 
 olives planted about them, with cool rocking-chairs in 
 the freshness of the verandahs even these would 
 betray their Southern nature by a ragged fence of 
 un painted rails, reeling and staggering in the lightest 
 breeze, because somebody was still thinking about 
 knocking in a nail. The streets of square granite 
 
 Q 
 
98 IN THE SOUTH. 
 
 blocks and the pavements of red bricks had none of 
 the trim evenness of Portland or the better parts of 
 Boston. They had begun to rise into hills at Rich- 
 mond; in Wilmington they were alpine. Most of 
 the streets were not even paved, but were barely 
 fordable drifts of black sandy loam. The very electric 
 cars for not even the southernmost of American 
 cities can forego its electric cars were empty and 
 unpainted, and they seesawed along their undulating 
 rails without spirit, as if the electricity had gone stale. 
 Mules stumbled along, jerking rattling vans behind 
 them. Here came a creaking bullock - cart, with a 
 blue -Moused nigger swinging on a broken water- 
 barrel inside it. And in the very midmost pavement 
 of the market-place sat three hens, and the citizens 
 strolled round to avoid starting them. Oh yes, this 
 was unquestionably the South. 
 
 Now I understand why my Northern friends had 
 all warned me against the South. " There s nothing 
 worth seeing," expostulated one and all. 
 
 " Well, there s the South," I urged. " A beastly 
 country." " We ve always had a kind of tenderness 
 for it," I pleaded. " I know you have, but heaven 
 knows what you ever saw attractive in it." To the 
 hurrying, pushing Northern man, who is proud to 
 profess and call himself a hustler, I believe there 
 is something almost humiliating in the fact that he 
 is of the same nation as basking, dawdling, untidy 
 Wilmington. In Richmond there was nothing to be 
 
RESPECTABLE RICHMOND. 99 
 
 ashamed of ; for Richmond, since the war left her 
 a depopulated ruin sown with ashes, has advanced 
 to be a flourishing manufacturing and trading town. 
 Richmond, moreover, though I should not call it in 
 any sense a fine place, is decently clean, and wears a 
 look of industry and thrift. It is not finished yet, of 
 course nothing is on this side of the Atlantic except 
 poor Wilmington. But Richmond looks prosperous 
 and has public monuments, and at least has the 
 interest of her battlefields, which are a perfectly 
 respectable thing for any city to show. But Wil 
 mington ! What could be taking any sane man to 
 Wilmington ? 
 
 Yet even Wilmington is not without her modest 
 industrial achievements. You approach her through 
 miles and miles of straggling pine wood, and though 
 the trade in resin and turpentine is largely worked 
 out, and has gone further south, there is still a bit of a 
 lumber export. Moreover, in Wilmington the British 
 vice-consul, son of a Scotch West Indian, has built 
 up the largest cotton export business in the whole 
 of America. Three Liverpool-bound steamers lay at 
 his wharves, and hour by hour the bales of cotton 
 were swung aboard. In the warehouse, hour by hour, 
 the huge cotton -press sent up a blast of screaming 
 steam as it dealt with a fresh bale. Before they go 
 under the press they are fat cushions of the fluffy 
 white stuff, as big as two of the biggest travelling- 
 trunks you can conceive. A couple of panting niggers 
 
 OF THF 
 
 f UNIVERSITY ) 
 
 or 
 
 04 r ir* 
 
 or J 
 
100 IN THE SOUTH. 
 
 drag up the bundle and put it under the press. Great 
 iron jaws grip it above and below, and look as if they 
 must meet in it. Then the steam hisses out overhead, 
 the jaws relax, and toss out a neat brick of compressed 
 cotton no more than six inches thick, metal -bound 
 and ready for shipping in five minutes. After all, 
 why should Wilmington blush ? There is not the 
 equal of this machine between the Chesapeake and 
 Mexico. 
 
 Indeed, the whole South so the machine s master 
 told me is looking up commercially. Atlanta and 
 Savannah are its show-places, but the advance runs 
 almost along the whole line. The very farmers, he 
 thought, are better off than they were three years ago. 
 Then they staked their all on cotton, and imported 
 the bacon they ate and the very hay for their horses 
 from the West. Now they grow enough for them 
 selves, so that they stand to lose less on a bad or an 
 excessive cotton crop either of which is apt to spell 
 ruin. 
 
 And then the nigger. To the stranger of a day 
 there is much entertainment in the nigger. But the 
 born Southerner, or the Southerner by adoption, or 
 even the Northerner who knows the South, sees no 
 comedy in him. As I came South last night from 
 Eichmond I conversed with two Northern men. One 
 was a drummer which is American for a bagman 
 from New York; the other a Canadian, from far North 
 of the Great Lakes a stout - built, square - headed 
 
THE NIGGER. 101 
 
 young man, shcrt of a thumb on the right hand, who 
 had sturdily exchanged 40 below zero for 100 in the 
 shade, and manages a big lumber business in South 
 Carolina. "I was in a hotel up North," said the 
 traveller it is hopeless to follow his rich profanity 
 with any mere blanks " and I went into the dining- 
 room, and there was a nigger head-waiter, sir. Yes, 
 sir a nigger ordering white girls about; I tell you 
 that made me tired. Then this nigger head-waiter 
 came, and showed me to a table with three niggers ! 
 When I was paying my bill to go to another hotel, 
 the clerk said, * Why do you object to sit with the 
 coloured gentlemen ? I didn t see any gentlemen/ 
 says I ; I saw three buck niggers, if that s what you 
 mean. Ah, he says, that race problem will never 
 be solved. Yes, I says ; but it is solved in the 
 South. It adjusts itself. Treat them as servants 
 that s all they re fit for and if one gets fresh, shoot 
 him. " "Quite right," said the Canadian. 
 
 This Canadian s views of the nigger had been arrived 
 at after a perfectly unprejudiced study of him. "You 
 know," he said to me, " they make a man lazy. If I 
 go to Canada and get out at the station with two 
 grips, everybody s got his own work to do, and I must 
 carry them for myself. Down here there s half-a- 
 dozen niggers wmld carry them miles for a nickel. 
 Now, in Canada, you see the farmer ploughing his 
 land, and all his sons, down to a little kid of twelve, 
 working with him. In Texas you see the planter 
 
102 IN THE SOUTH. 
 
 sitting with his feet up on the verandah all day, 
 reading some fool newspaper with no profit in it. 
 Then he lets off twenty-five acres here to John John 
 son, and twenty - five there to Tom Thomson, and 
 another twenty -five to Bill Bilson. Then he turns 
 his back, and the nigger don t fertilise the land. He 
 works one day, and the next he goes off to the next 
 town to see a man because he didn t see him the day 
 before. He s just like a monkey, the nigger. He s 
 always idling about to see something new, or trying to 
 learn some fool trick that nobody else can do, and 
 that ll never be any good to him. He d sooner go on 
 a bicycle than in a train, and he d sooner have a gun 
 than money." 
 
 It is quite true ; niggers are like monkeys. I have 
 been watching them all day. It is not only their 
 backward sloping foreheads, and huge projecting lips. 
 They squat about the street and jabber like monkeys ; 
 they are always pinching each other or trying little 
 tricks, such as throwing up a nut and catching it in 
 the mouth. A black cannot even walk down the 
 street without touching everything laid out before 
 every shop he passes. I must own that it seems to 
 me awful that these people should have votes, and 
 in a town like Wilmington should actually have a 
 majority of votes. " They were made by the same 
 Creator as made you," said a Northerner to me. Pos 
 sibly ; but they were certainly not made in the same 
 way. " And how would you like it," broke in a white- 
 
AGAINST NATURE. 103 
 
 haired Southerner, " if in Boston a crowd of people of 
 no property, of no education, wanting, by reason of the 
 history of their race, in truth and honour, sobriety and 
 chastity, were in a position to tax your property, to 
 waste your money, and to bring your Government to 
 ruin ? " " Why, by the Lord ! " cried the Bostonian, 
 " that s just what we have got in Boston the Irish." 
 " Try the nigger a few years, and you ll pray to have 
 the Irish back again," was the reply. 
 
 It is not quite so bad as that now. It was, though, 
 just after the war, when a gang of Kepublican carpet 
 baggers came down from the North and formed the 
 new black voters into an organisation for legalised 
 political plunder. Not that the nigger now gives any 
 trouble. In Wilmington, as a gentleman told me who 
 employs hundreds of them, the blacks are very tract 
 able. " The only jealousy comes from a class of white 
 man so low as to compete industrially with them." 
 He had had the same black family servants over forty 
 years since the days before the war. But even this 
 friend of the negro was shocked at the idea of their 
 mingling with the white race. " It produces a good- 
 for-nothing mongrel, and demoralises the whole popu 
 lation. You can see plainly that it is not the will of 
 Providence," he went on, in all pious sincerity, " that 
 the races should mix. If they intermarry, after four 
 or five mulatto children, there will come one quite 
 black a completely African type. No ; it is against 
 the laws of Nature and of Heaven," 
 
104 IN THE SOUTH. 
 
 So there the Southern nigger lives alongside of the 
 white man, yet as far away from him as if he had 
 never left the home of his grandfathers. He neither 
 marries among them nor gives to them in marriage. 
 A " c " " coloured " stands against his name in the 
 directory. He has his own stores, for he would not 
 be suffered inside those of the white. He may not 
 stay in the same hotel, nor travel in the same railway- 
 carriage, nor even worship beside the white ; there are 
 separate coloured churches for coloured Christians. 
 And he is quite happy and lazy, jolly and improvident. 
 His eyes and his lips gleam with white eyeball and 
 tooth when you look at him; he salaams when you 
 speak to him, and fans you as you sit at table. He 
 can supply all the wants that he is capable of feeling ; 
 he is satisfied with his proper position of inferiority. 
 The problem adjusts itself. 
 
106 
 
 XIII. 
 
 SOUTHERN POLITICS. 
 
 PHILADELPHIA, September 26. 
 
 * THIS is the keenest election I ever was in, and the 
 queerest." So spoke Senator Faulkner, chairman of 
 the Democratic Congressional Committee at Washing 
 ton. The room was papered with portraits of William 
 J. Bryan, of various approximations to a likeness, and 
 carpeted with newspapers, maps, tracts on silver, and 
 all the other litter of an election headquarters. "How 
 the queerest ? " I asked. " Why, usually you can tell 
 by the middle of October or before just about what 
 vote can be gotten out on each side. This time there 
 will be " he paused a second with a wry face 
 " some rich Democrats who will go for M Kinley or 
 that little Indianapolis ticket. On the other hand, we 
 shall get a lot of factory operatives that they count on. 
 They wear a M Kinley button, and you hear that only 
 eight men in this factory or twelve in that are for 
 Bryan. Wait till they get hold of the ballot paper. 
 For the first time in the history of this country every 
 
106 SOUTHERN POLITICS. 
 
 big labour organisation is solid on the same side 
 on our side. For the first time in the history of this 
 country, sir." 
 
 " It must need a deal of organisation." " You may 
 say so. We have an organisation and so has the 
 other side that covers the whole country, and goes 
 right up to headquarters. The smallest division is 
 the precinct. The precinct reports to the county 
 organisation, that to the Congressional district, that to 
 the State, and that to the National organisation. In a 
 precinct there will be only from fifty to a hundred and 
 fifty voters, so they can t miss getting on to what vote 
 each man s going to give. Then we know where we re 
 weak and where we re strong. We neglect those 
 States, and put all our literature and speakers into 
 the doubtful ones. Do you see ? " 
 
 " I see. And what are the safe States and what are 
 the doubtful ones ? " " Well, we ve almost given up 
 the North." I may mention here that the unstable 
 John Boyd Thacher, whose nomination at Buffalo 
 under the influence of Tammany Hall I described a 
 week ago, has behaved exactly as I said he would. 
 He has issued a manifesto explaining quite shame 
 lessly that he is going to vote for the silver candidate, 
 but that personally he is in favour of gold. There 
 upon public pressure has forced him to retire. Of 
 course this has badly demoralised the Democrats in 
 New York, and confusion has radiated thence all over 
 the East " In the South," resumed Senator Faulkner, 
 
HOW TO ELECT A PRESIDENT. 107 
 
 "there are 159 electoral votes. We reckon to get 
 all those, with the possible exception of two States. 
 In the West, again, there are sixty-one votes, and we 
 make sure of all those, with again the possible excep 
 tion of two small States. That makes 220 voices in 
 the Electoral College, and 224 gives a majority for Mr 
 Bryan. So even if we lose the four States I spoke 
 of and gain any two of these central States Ohio, 
 Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and 
 Michigan then Mr Bryan will be elected." 
 
 I ought to say, for those who have not threaded the 
 mazes of the United States constitution, that the 
 American people do not vote for their President 
 directly. Each State chooses, on the basis of its 
 population, so many voters, in the Electoral College of 
 447, which then proceeds to make the election. This 
 hardly seems an ideal democratic method, and many 
 people condemn it. The man who gets a majority of 
 the electors has not necessarily a majority on the 
 popular vote. A bare majority in a big State choosing 
 twenty or thirty electors may easily weigh down a 
 wellnigh unanimous vote in half-a-dozen small ones. 
 In 1884 a majority of 1150 in New York, which re 
 turns thirty-six electors, turned the whole election. 
 
 Senator Faulkner s reckoning of the chances repre 
 sents the general official and unofficial opinion of his 
 side. They all refuse to hear a doubt about anything 
 West of the Missouri, or South of Mason and Dixon s 
 line. The only doubt is suggested by some Southern 
 
108 SOUTHERN POLITICS. 
 
 Democrats, who have the slenderest confidence in the 
 honesty of their Populist allies. These think it very 
 possible that if the electors were nearly equal for 
 Bryan and M Kinley, the money power, which is 
 pretty nearly all on the Eepublican side, would be 
 used to buy up a few eligible Populists. It would pay 
 the monopolists of the great trusts, I was assured, to 
 give a million apiece for enough of such commodities 
 to turn the election. Only I should not care to be the 
 deserting Populist when he went down South again, 
 where men carry revolvers. And I can hardly doubt 
 that the difficulty of getting Democrats and Populists 
 to agree on a coalition list of electors and State candi 
 dates is a grave anxiety to Mr Bryan s managers. 
 Senator Faulkner refused to admit this into his calcula 
 tions at all. Nevertheless, I quote his estimate of the 
 chances, not because I believe much in it, or in any 
 other public forecast at this stage, but because it is to 
 a certain extent official, and because Mr Faulkner 
 counted his chickens with a moderation that is con 
 spicuously absent in most such statements. The im 
 pression I took away was that he expected it to be a 
 near thing, and, balancing everything, was not unpre 
 pared for defeat. 
 
 At Richmond I chanced upon General Buckner, the 
 stout old Confederate soldier, who is candidate for 
 Vice-President on behalf of the Gold Democrats, the 
 Liberal Unionists of this campaign. I thought I 
 might correct my Silver Democratic estimate with 
 
GENERAL BUCKNER. 109 
 
 his aid. The battles and marches of thirty years back 
 have left little enough mark on his hale figure ; the 
 hearty voice and clear blue eye belie the flowing silver 
 of his hair and the written record of his eighty years. 
 Dressed in black broadcloth, with low waistcoat and 
 white tie, he recalled the old English type of which 
 Mr Jowett was the last. Though I never remember 
 to have seen the late Master of Balliol smoking a long 
 corn-cob pipe, nor did he usually receive visitors in 
 the act of putting on his coat. General Buckner did 
 both, and remained a courtly gentleman. 
 
 About his own chance and that of his colleague 
 General Palmer, he said little : everybody knows that 
 they have none. But he was quite confident that 
 their candidature meant the defeat of Mr Bryan. 
 " I think you may assure your people that it s all 
 right," he cried sturdily. To English ideas it may 
 appear strange that this candidature should help Mr 
 M Kinley ; it seems like helping a Tory to beat a 
 Radical by running a Liberal Unionist. But in the 
 United States a man is more liable to vote against 
 his principles than against his party. " And do you 
 think," I inquired, " there s any danger of serious 
 trouble ? " " Oh no," smiled the man who in his day 
 had really fought against the Union. " We take 
 these things very keenly at the time, but we re as 
 good friends as ever when the fight s over. One or 
 two million Democrats will have come back and be 
 voting with us for the gold standard two years hence." 
 
110 SOUTHERN POLITICS. 
 
 How likely this may be it is not for me to say, 
 But one thing at least is tolerably certain : the South 
 will go dead against the North now and in the future 
 in any way it gets a chance. I had imagined before 
 I went South that the war feeling was dead and buried 
 years ago: I was astonished at the bitterness that 
 survives. In the train to Kichinond was a Virginian 
 gentleman returning from abroad, and for a long time 
 he refused to take into his conversation a third pas 
 senger who sat in a corner of the little smoking- 
 compartment. He thought he was a Northerner. 
 But presently he discovered that this too was a 
 Southern man, a North Carolinian. In two minutes 
 they were side by side, comparing this general with 
 that, and exchanging stories of the battles they had 
 been in. After the Virginian had gone I talked with 
 the other. " Do you know, sir," he said, " that the 
 United States Government is publishing all the rec 
 ords of the war, Federal and Confederate together ? 
 And these records show, sir, that to the North s four 
 million we never had more than six hundred thousand 
 men. One of their own colonels has admitted that on 
 no one day, what with wounds and sickness, and never 
 knowing when the negroes would not rise and kill the 
 women, could the South put more than two hundred 
 thousand men in line. Why, at the end, at Appomat- 
 tox, with Lee, there were no more than nine thousand 
 rifles surrendered. Lee was always weak; he always 
 had to be thinking of some device to get even with 
 
THE DAYS OF RECONSTRUCTION. Ill 
 
 em. Ah, sir, he was every inch a general, was Lee." 
 I told him that in England we had always thought 
 so. " Yes ; a few people have done us justice. But 
 the North has the ear of the world; they write the 
 books and issue the publications, and we sit here at 
 home, and nobody ever thinks of us any more." 
 
 I was amazed to find this smouldering passion the 
 more so as this instance was not an isolated one. I 
 think it comes less from vengeful memories of the 
 war than from what followed after the war. When 
 the blacks became free men and voters, there de 
 scended from the North a gang of the most unscru 
 pulous Eepublican bosses. These political pirates 
 organised and led the negroes, and bled the country 
 till it was white as veal. The debt of North Carolina 
 alone went up to thirty million dollars, and the more 
 the debt grew the more the taxes grew. Money was 
 not accounted for, was not spent ; it simply melted 
 away. At last the patience of the whites broke, and 
 in South Carolina was formerly the organisation of 
 the Ked Shirts. They put up a Southern general for 
 Governor, and wherever he was to speak about a 
 thousand red-shirted whites would sling their riiies 
 over their shoulders, saddle their horses, and ride off 
 to demonstrate. " I was not in favour of it," said my 
 North Carolinian friend. "I never said a word in 
 favour of it. But they intimidated those niggers, sir, 
 to admiration." In North Carolina the power of the 
 ring was not broken till 1876. That is twenty years 
 
112 SOUTHERN POLITICS. 
 
 ago, but for all the healing time has done it might 
 have been yesterday. The Republicans of the North 
 have been paying the penalty of their corruption ever 
 since. The result of the years of spoliation is that 
 for a white man to proclaim himself Eepublican in 
 the South is almost a repudiation of his race a 
 step back beside the nigger and towards the brute. 
 That is why the National Democratic candidature is 
 expected to do such good to the cause of gold in 
 the South. Democrat is a synonym for white man, 
 and the white man can be expected to vote for no 
 candidate who appeals to any other name. 
 
 As to the real extent of agricultural depression I 
 have heard various opinions. I quoted in my last 
 chapter the view of the first man of business in 
 Wilmington ; he thought things had improved. 
 General Buckner held much the same view. " The 
 losses of the farmers," he said, "have been much 
 exaggerated by agitators. Both farmers and planters 
 live in the greatest comfort. The only thing they 
 have to complain of is that they have spoilt their 
 market for money by their own folly in supporting 
 free silver. The banks are afraid of a run on them 
 if Mr Bryan succeeds, and they are calling in their 
 loans." On the other hand, a leading Southern editor, 
 who should know, and certainly was quite sincere, 
 told me that the losses by the depreciation of prices 
 had been terrible. In Georgia alone, he said, they 
 had been computed at thirty-two million dollars. 
 
MR CLEVELAND S PARTIALITY. 113 
 
 Another source of bitterness and of grave danger 
 in the South, this gentleman told me, is irritation 
 against President Cleveland. The South believed 
 in 1892 that it was electing a bimetallist, and I 
 was told that more than one member of his Cabinet 
 was virtually pledged to bimetallism. The President 
 turned out a stout supporter of the gold standard, 
 and now he and many of his Ministers have written 
 letters and made speeches on behalf of Generals 
 Palmer and Buckner, and the Indianapolis ticket. 
 At the same time, the President is believed to have 
 offered the choice between silence and dismissal to 
 certain subordinate officials who have given active 
 support to Mr Bryan. I think it must be owned 
 that the President s conduct has been partial. For 
 a Civil Service reformer to dismiss some holder of 
 a 100-dollar post-office for his political opinions ia 
 neither very consistent nor very dignified. " These 
 things make men mad," said the editor. "It s bad 
 enough in the towns, but the farmers are worse. 
 They re fighting mad, sir. I know half-a-dozen who 
 are ready to take their guns and come out at this 
 moment." 
 
 It is always difficult to say how much set purpose 
 there is behind talk like this. The Northern men 
 laughed at the idea. But they also laughed a genera 
 tion ago until the first gun boomed out war at Fort 
 Sumter. Whether Bryan wins or loses there is like 
 enough to be a good deal of financial distress this 
 
 H 
 
114 SOUTHERN POLITICS. 
 
 winter. I do not say that the excitement and ill-will 
 may not die suddenly away by the second week of 
 November, as it traditionally does. On the whole, 
 so far as I am competent to have an opinion, I should 
 say it will. Yet nothing would surprise me less than 
 to find that this time it does not. Perhaps the South 
 will wait for the signal of red revolt to be held out in 
 some other part of the country the West or some 
 industrial centre. If that signal should ever come, 
 it will find the South ready. 
 
115 
 
 XIV. 
 
 PHILADELPHIA. 
 
 PHILADELPHIA, September 29. 
 
 IT was only by luck fchat I left Philadelphia until the 
 last of Eastern cities, but good luck it certainly was. 
 Philadelphia is the most English of them all English, 
 that is, not in the way of outward seeming or slavish 
 mimicry, but in the circumstances of its growth, and 
 the life and character of its poople. Here is the purest 
 Anglo-Saxon citizen body among all the large centres. 
 Here is less luxury than elsewhere, but more comfort, 
 and comfort extending deeper down. New York is a 
 city of offices and palaces ; Boston of parks and villas ; 
 "Washington of public buildings and houses let for 
 the season. Philadelphia is a city of homes. Of 
 its two hundred thousand families it has been esti 
 mated that seven-eighths live in self-contained houses, 
 who elsewhere would be in flats or tenements, and 
 that three - quarters of these own the houses they 
 live in. 
 
 After the others, Philadelphia strikes you as beyond 
 
116 PHILADELPHIA. 
 
 all things a civilised city a city where people some 
 times have a little leisure. Elsewhere they do busi 
 ness or seek pleasure ; here they Jive. The very 
 names of the streets Chestnut, Walnut, Vine, 
 Spruce, Pine have a fresh and wholesome breath 
 about them. It may be fancy, but the women here 
 seem prettier and the men better set up. The New 
 Yorker takes a tram-car to go a quarter of a mile, and 
 grows fat; here the physical type is more athletic. 
 The richer Philadelphians live out in the country 
 and ride to hounds ; the poorest rides a bicycle. The 
 typical American woman s face long, thin, pale, pure- 
 eyed, like an early Italian Madonna is here richer 
 and less austere. Middle-class you may call the place, 
 with its endless rows of sober red brick ; but middle- 
 class with little of dowdiness, and much of rational 
 stability. If there are few notable buildings, there are 
 few slums. If few people are very prosperous, few are 
 very wretched. In sum, the Philadelphians get more 
 happiness per head out of their city than any other 
 townsmen in America. 
 
 Philadelphia, like London, has made itself. Spread 
 ing from a commercial centre, it has felt its way out 
 to the fringe of manufacturing towns round it, and 
 woven them into a piece of itself with streets on 
 streets of artisans dwellings. The old business city 
 is on the tongue between the Delaware and Schuylkill 
 rivers. As it extended and made itself fast to dis 
 tricts beyond, the value of land in the centre weni 
 
EQUABLE PROSPERITY. 117 
 
 up but slowly. In New York, a man with an old 
 house in the heart of the city must tear it down to 
 put up a twelve-storeyed skyscraper, or must make 
 ready to be taxed out of existence. In Philadelphia 
 the rise in land value has been continuous, but it has 
 been steady. For result you have houses standing in 
 busiest Chestnut Street, that fifty years ago were 
 country villas. You have walls and windows that 
 looked down on the Eevolution. While this equable 
 prosperity came over the centre, there grew up the 
 tracts of undistinguished houses round about it. 
 There are a hundred and fifty thousand of them, 
 and you can no easier tell them apart than peas out 
 of a pod. But in these houses the Philadelphian 
 workman lives and dies ; his son lives and dies there 
 after him ; and his grandson after his son. Among 
 the poor it happens nowhere else in America, and 
 seldom enough in Europe. In Philadelphia this local 
 attachment is characteristic of rich and poor alike. 
 
 There are born of this principle of habitation many 
 salutary features of civic life. The fact that Phila 
 delphia s municipal debt is going down touches me 
 but little ; the fact that her streets, alone among those 
 I have yet seen, are decently and smoothly paved with 
 asphalt, moves me to approbation ; the fact that Phila 
 delphia made the electric road-car companies pay for 
 the improvement commands my unrestrained enthu 
 siasm. The municipal government of this city has 
 its interest as the product less of a few commanding 
 
118 PHILADELPHIA. 
 
 personalities than of the general momentum of a half- 
 unconscious public. So with society. Because these 
 people live year in, year out, in their own homes, 
 there grows up between them the bond of a neigh 
 bourly friendship such as exists in few cities even 
 in the Old World. Then again, there are scores of 
 building associations, friendly societies, clubs, religious 
 guilds, and the like. Wages are good ; add to that 
 these interests, every one managed by the clerks and 
 artisans who constitute their membership, and you 
 have the makings of a happy life. 
 
 A friend of mine here has two servants, quadroon 
 girls: they get their board and lodging and wages, 
 equal to about 50 a -year. Both of them have 
 just bought bicycles. One of them is a prominent 
 member of the Zion Methodist African Episcopal 
 Church. One day her master was going to speak 
 in public. " Mary," he said, " you ve often wished to 
 hear me speak ; you can come to-night if you like." 
 " I should love to hear you, sah," answered Mary ; 
 " but I m speaking myself to - night." She is now 
 selling among her personal acquaintances alone a 
 hundred and sixty dollars worth of tickets for the 
 Z.MA.E.C. s annual celebration. A bicycle, public 
 speaking, and a circle of friends equal to taking 32 
 worth of tickets for a celebration the life of that 
 little yellow girl cannot be a very dull or unhappy 
 one. 
 
 As for joung men, there is no end to their societies 
 
WORK AND PLAY. 119 
 
 and orders. My same friend had a lad in his employ 
 at five dollars a- week : this is only a lad s wages, for 
 an unskilled man can always get his dollar a-day if 
 he is steady, and skilled mechanics command anything 
 upward of nine dollars. That must be put against 
 higher prices on this side the Atlantic. A journalist 
 told me that he worked with a compositor who, 
 having a fancy for the opera, used to come to the 
 office in evening dress as often as he did himself. It 
 was his fancy, and he could afford to give it play. 
 One day, to resume, the lad before mentioned appeared 
 at the office with a queer-shaped parcel. It turned 
 out on investigation to be a stage sword of the most 
 magnificent proportions, price four dollars. He was 
 to wear it that evening as a Knight of Malta, of 
 which honourable order he was a member. There 
 cannot be much wrong with the social conditions of 
 a city where at seventeen, and on a pound a-week, 
 you can be a Knight of Malta. 
 
 But the neighbourly association which Philadelphia 
 has been able to develop has also its pecuniary side ; 
 it would hardly be American if it had not. When 
 Tom, the Knight of Malta, comes to be twenty-five 
 years old, he will be desiring to marry. If he has 
 not dissipated too much on the pomp of chivalry, he 
 will by that time have saved perhaps five hundred 
 dollars. His wife will have been five or six years 
 behind the counter of a store, earning from four to 
 seven dollars a-week, and, living in her father s house, 
 
120 PHILADELPHIA. 
 
 she also will have saved five hundred dollars. Tom 
 is a member of a building association in his neighbour 
 hood, which has a membership purely of mechanics, 
 and is managed entirely by its members. Tom and 
 his wife set up in a little house costing two or three 
 thousand dollars ; it is paid for, over and above the 
 savings, by two mortgages one to the builder, one 
 to the association whereto Tom is a contributor. All 
 the members know Tom. They guess he is a steady 
 and punctual payer, so they lend the money to him 
 rather than to plausible Jerry, who offers a couple 
 per cent more interest, but has little reputation for 
 paying cash. In ten or fifteen years, with decent 
 luck, the mortgages are paid off, and the house is 
 the property of the occupiers. There is a ground- 
 rent to pay, but it is constant for ever. It can 
 never be raised, and the benefit of the unearned 
 increment goes to Tom : he can even extinguish the 
 ground - rent at eighteen years purchase or there 
 abouts. It may be that the family has increased 
 beyond the limit of the six- or eight-roomed house to 
 which he first brought home his wife. Then Tom 
 rents a bigger one, and lets the other ; but he has 
 always the original house to go back to when his 
 children leave him for six - roomed homes of their 
 own. Tom ends his days as a householder, and an 
 owner of real estate. If he has done well, he is the 
 owner not only of the one house, but perhaps of 
 the next and the next. The acres of little undis- 
 
MANUFACTORIES. 121 
 
 tinguished streets that you may wander through 
 unprofitably for hours are the savings bank of the 
 thrifty Philadelphian. 
 
 There is plenty of good work for Tom in and about 
 the city, if he knows his business and will do it. 
 Times are bad just now, it is true, and work will be 
 scarce until after the election, and then afterwards 
 who knows? Yet Philadelphia has half-a-dozen 
 factories, any one of which may put in a not un 
 reasonable claim to be the biggest of its kind in the 
 world. There is Cramp s shipbuilding-yard, which 
 has just got an order for one of the new Yankee 
 battleships, and is expecting another for a couple 
 of cruisers from Japan. Then there is Baldwin s 
 locomotive works. By the courtesy of the firm I 
 was shown over this famous factory the other day. 
 In 1831 there was built here the first American loco 
 motive, and the firm is now at about its fifteen 
 thousandth. From the sixteen acres of its shops 
 and sheds it can turn out the equivalent of three 
 railway engines and one- third in a day. From the 
 first drawing of the plans only eight days of pattern- 
 making, moulding, casting, forging, riveting, and mill 
 ing lead up to the moment when the electric crane 
 picks up the two hundred tons of completed engine 
 and slings it like a packing-case on to the rails where 
 it is to live and die. The locomotive engine is begotten 
 as a page in an order-book, with every detail of con 
 struction and dimension carefully specified, so that if 
 
122 PHILADELPHIA. 
 
 any part of it goes wrong in after-life it can be 
 replaced infallibly by mere reference to a date and 
 number. From that point on I saw every phase of 
 its incubation until it goes forth full-grown to wage 
 its lifelong war on the fiend distance. Here was the 
 laboratory to test the chemical composition of the 
 materials and the gauge. Here a man was brushing 
 out the crumbs from the plumbago mould of a wheel. 
 There another was making the core of clay kneaded 
 round a skeleton of iron, which marks the place of 
 daylight in the mould: when the molten metal is 
 poured in and cooled the embedded clay is knocked 
 out, and the open parts of the wheel appear. Behind 
 him the bits of iron from the scrap-heap were being 
 carefully built up like a child s house of bricks, against 
 the time when, cased in wood and sandwiched in slag, 
 they should be turned into the furnace. Now with 
 a fiery blast a furnace opens, and out of the jaws of 
 hell swings a white - hot mass of iron. The crane 
 guides it on to the anvil, and the great steam-hammer 
 comes down and punches and flattens it into shape 
 as a boy squeezes a snowball. In the next room is 
 a milling tool of tempered steel hollowing out the 
 curves in a connecting rod of annealed steel ; in 
 the next a cutter of tempered steel sharpening the 
 knives in a milling tool of annealed. Such is the 
 cunning of man to make steel the instrument that 
 tames its kindred steel to his service. 
 
 Above that again, on the top storey, was a row of 
 
NOT ALWAYS IN A HURRY. 123 
 
 great engine- tenders waiting their turn to be painted. 
 Did you ever think of railway tenders as being put to 
 bed by the dozen up four flights of stairs ? Perhaps 
 you did. Perhaps you know all about it, and will tell 
 me I did not need to come three thousand miles to see 
 how locomotive engines are made. But answer me 
 this riddle, British engineer ! Here was an engine 
 waiting to go to Canada ; here another being packed 
 for New Zealand, and another for Japan ; here another 
 being carved up into two -hundred -and -fifty -pound 
 fractions, that are to climb a mountain road on mule- 
 packs in Venezuela. That may be all comprehensible. 
 But why must men come, like me, three thousand 
 miles to Philadelphia when they want railway engines 
 in Barcelona and Jerusalem, in Christiania and Eiga ? 
 Answer me that, British engineer ! 
 
 But I arn no engineer. I will leave that and walk 
 again along the street of Germantown, and admire the 
 simple lines of the old stone-built houses hiding dis 
 creetly behind their ivy in the recesses of their lawns 
 and of their oaks and elms. I will dawdle again by 
 the ripples of Wissahickon Creek, and smear my boots 
 with the heaped-up chestnuts and acorns and the red 
 leaves. Or I will go along Chestnut Street at sunset 
 and watch the stream of well-built Philadelphians, 
 who have worked hard, and are now going to rest. If 
 I ask my way, and then say " Thank you," they will 
 have time to reply, " You re very welcome." Give me 
 a city where somebody sometimes is not in a hurry. 
 
124 
 
 XV. 
 
 AT THE SHRINE OF M C KINLEY. 
 
 CANTON, OHIO, October I. 
 
 " IT S a wash-out," said the nigger who makes up the 
 beds in the sleeper. I did not quite know what a 
 wash-out was, but I was certain that when I woke up 
 at six the train was very much in the same place as 
 it was when I went to bed at eleven. Eain had been 
 falling till Philadelphia was more like Niagara, and 
 yet the stuffy heat had been such that it was impos 
 sible to move without gasping for air. When I looked 
 out of the window yesterday morning the clear sun 
 shine was struggling to get the better of the early 
 frost. I got up and took a morning constitutional on 
 the line, and there learnt the truth. 
 
 The rivers had risen and the winds had blown, and 
 a bridge between us and Pittsburgh had been carried 
 away. After seven hours of alternate standstill and 
 going back, we were now about to fetch a circuit of a 
 matter of a hundred and fifty miles on to the main 
 line again. So we climbed meekly on board, and 
 
THROUGH PENNSYLVANIA. 125 
 
 clotheless, break fast/less, and with the certainty of 
 being ten to twelve hours late everywhere, off we 
 went. I had never given the Americans credit for 
 being a patient people, and I was astonished at their 
 philosophy. They smiled, and appeared to take it as 
 a natural incident of railway travel unfortunate, but 
 no way astonishing. If it had happened in England, 
 every man would have fallen incontinently to writing 
 to his favourite newspaper. Here but one man went 
 so far as to write a telegram. 
 
 The train strolled leisurely on through the un 
 kempt-looking fields of central Pennsylvania, where 
 the farmer is content with three acres of maize and a 
 cow, and looks on increase of crops or stock as in 
 crease of trouble. Presently we climbed the wooded 
 mountains now dappled with every colour from living 
 green to crimson and the intensest yellow that form 
 the watershed between the eastward streams and the 
 great Mississippi basin. Then we raced down by the 
 turbid brown freshet of the Alleghany river. Here 
 is the Black Country of America. Hence to the 
 farthest West stretches a broad belt of coal, so gener 
 ous that the country-people have only to break a hole 
 in the hillside and take out all their winter s supply. 
 Here also is iron, and in the fading daylight we ran 
 between banks of coal, rising overhead on each side of 
 the line, through clouds of choking grey smoke, through 
 flames leaping from tall chimneys and flickering away 
 in narrowing avenues to the lurid horizon. 
 
126 AT THE SHRINE OF M KINLEY. 
 
 At Pittsburgh came newspapers and details of the 
 great storm. It was the greatest the world had ever 
 seen at least the greatest for a long time. Had it 
 not carried clean away the greatest bridge in the 
 world that is, the greatest of its own particular 
 kind ? To find enough greatest things on earth to go 
 round such a large continent, it may be here observed, 
 necessitates a good deal of rather minute subdivision. 
 The big cities have the greatest thing on earth right 
 out ; the small ones invent a special brand of it, and 
 have the greatest on earth of that. As for the storm, 
 it was a very great one, and I doubt not that the 
 newspaper correspondents on thia side will have done 
 it full justice. I can add nothing to them, for I was 
 asleep through the thick of it. 
 
 There appeared in the train at Pittsburgh, or there 
 abouts, a phenomenon of far more interest to the 
 philosophic mind than a hundred of the greatest 
 storms and washes - out ever seen. This was Mr 
 M Kinley s brother. It will probably be news to 
 most Britons that Mr M Kinley so much as has a 
 brother. Yet in the spectacle of that brother in the 
 smoking-compartment American democracy was writ 
 so large as few people have the luck to see it. He 
 was not unlike the pictures of the candidate. He was 
 stout, and his trousers were tight ; so very obviously 
 were his boots. Of his discourse it is not needful to 
 speak ; it was shrewd and good-humoured rather than 
 grammatical. He was not unmindful of the spittoon. 
 
HIS BROTHER. 127 
 
 He talked quite freely about his celebrated brother, 
 aud he talked to everybody who liked to talk with 
 him. The waiters in the dining-car chaffed him, and 
 the conductor slapped him on the back. This morning 
 I met him again in a Canton newspaper office; he 
 was diverting his mind with a little larking among 
 the reporters. ISTow, do try to imagine it. When you 
 can conceive the brother of the man who has more 
 than an even chance of becoming the first citizen 
 among sixty millions larking with provincial news 
 paper reporters and slapped on the back by the con 
 ductor of a railway-train why, then you will be a 
 good step on towards the comprehension of the United 
 States of America. 
 
 There was instruction again to be gleaned when I 
 reached Canton and sallied out this morning in the 
 drizzling aftermath of the great storm. In England 
 you would look for the man who is going to be Presi 
 dent in London ; in France, where but in Paris ? He 
 might have been born where he liked, but in the 
 capital he would surely be found. In the United 
 States the man whose name and features confront you 
 in every corner of their millions of square miles lives 
 in a two-storeyed wooden house in a little town that 
 but for him nobody would ever have heard of. Not 
 but what Canton also has its greatest things on earth, 
 as the Cantonese will take early occasion to inform 
 you. Just now it has two. One is but temporary 
 the silver bullion statue which formed the exhibit of 
 
128 AT THE SHRINE OF M KINLEY. 
 
 Montana at the World s Fair. In due time it is to 
 take its rightful place in Montana s Capitol, but Mon 
 tana s Capitol is not yet built, and it is filling up its 
 time with starring in the provinces. The other is a 
 watch-case factory, which, being ignorant how watch- 
 cases are made and desirous to remain so, I did not 
 visit. Still, when all is said and done, Canton has no 
 more than 40,000 inhabitants at the outside. This 
 is not so big but that a good proportion of its citizens 
 know Mr M Kinley to speak to, and nearly all by 
 sight. His mother still lives here in a tiny cottage 
 by the roadside. And here he sits among his fellow- 
 citizens, and waits to be made the governor of the 
 largest civilised population in the world. There is a 
 democracy among towns as among men, and it has 
 been well said that if the United States have no 
 capital they have also no provinces. The good side of 
 this is that otherwise such democracy must quickly 
 crush out individuality. The dubious side of it is the 
 frequent opinion that, " If Bill M Kinley gets in, he 
 ought to do something for Canton." But, whether for 
 one reason or the other, there is no doubt about Can 
 ton s enthusiasm for its citizen. I walked to his house 
 under banner after banner ; no shop window and few 
 private houses lacked at least one of his portraits. 
 So I came to the two-storeyed wooden house with 
 green window -frames and red shutters, one of a 
 row. Before it was a broken fence, part iron, part 
 wood. Also the place where a lawn should have been, 
 
THE CANDIDATE. 129 
 
 but not a blade had the feet of pious pilgrims left 
 there. 
 
 If you want to see a Presidential candidate you 
 ring the bell and walk in and see him. That is what 
 he is there for. I rang and walked in ; Mr M Kinley 
 was sitting on a rocking-chair in a little office not ten 
 feet from the door. His strong, clean-shaven face has 
 a suggestion of Charles Bradlaugh ; there is the same 
 lofty and massive forehead, the same mastiff power of 
 chin and jaw. Clear eyes, wide nose, full lips all his 
 features suggest dominant will and energy rather than 
 subtlety of mind or emotion. He had on the frock- 
 coat in which he was presently to address deputations, 
 and loosely tied brown slippers in which he was not. 
 He also was not unmindful of the spittoon. Yet with 
 that he is gifted with a kindly courtesy that is plainly 
 genuine and completely winning. I am no more pre 
 judiced in favour of the apostle of Protection than 
 any other Englishman ; yet it was impossible not to 
 feel absurd as it seemed that he was really glad to 
 see a wandering newspaper correspondent from the 
 country against which his whole policy has for years 
 been directed. Not to be tedious, his personality pre 
 sents a rare combination of strength and charm. But 
 when it came to the question of being interviewed, 
 though the charm remained, the strength got the bet 
 ter of it. No. He had made it a rule from the first 
 moment of his candidature, and in no single instance 
 had he departed from it. He was quite ready to ad- 
 
 I 
 
130 AT THE SHRINE OF M KINLEY. 
 
 mit that the contest was peculiarly well worth coming 
 to see; indeed, he was inclined to believe that the 
 whole country was an interesting one. He went so 
 far as to presume that the election was of some im 
 portance to many people even outside the United 
 States. But to be interviewed the indomitable chin 
 began to tighten up on the masterful jaw, and I left 
 off asking him. 
 
 Well, if I could not interview, at least I could be 
 interviewed. So Mr M Kinley turned me over with a 
 gracious farewell to some of his political and journal 
 istic friends. In a word, he made me free of Canton. 
 I have no doubt that its citizens will by now have 
 enjoyed a spirited account of me in general, and of 
 my opinions on the United States and their own 
 good town in particular. I may not see it, as I am 
 leaving by this evening s fast train. In the mean 
 time Mr M Kinley s staff provided me with refresh 
 ment, and took me to see a delegation. Three special 
 trains, swathed in golden-yellow bunting, came clank 
 ing in, and a whooping, screaming multitude surged 
 out on to the platform. Every man, woman, and child 
 wore a brilliant yellow badge, and most added yellow 
 flowers, yellow caps, a portrait of M Kinley, a tinsel 
 emblem of devotion to the gold standard, a fancy 
 button, and a miniature edition of the Stars and 
 Stripes. You could not move on the platform, and 
 you could not hear yourself speak. What a hopeless 
 mob ! But suddenly " Fall in ! " cried a voice. And 
 
THE PROCESSION. 131 
 
 before I quite knew what was happening the multi 
 tude had left the station and was formed up four 
 abreast in the street beyond. Then the word was 
 given to march. First came the leader on a grey 
 horse, clear ahead. Then a rank of mounted mar 
 shals, every man with his badge and decorations, the 
 horses with ribbons on the bridles and Stars and 
 Stripes for saddle - cloths. Behind them came two 
 carriages abreast, tricked out in every colour in which 
 bunting is made. Then three huge ensigns, and 
 almost as huge a mastiff, neck and tail tied up in 
 golden yellow, led solemnly in a yellow leash. Then 
 a gold -laced brass band. After them a long pro 
 cession of ladies, all the black jackets splashed with 
 yellow; and after them a company of men with red, 
 white, and blue umbrellas displayed. Next a great 
 yellow banner with the name and style of the depu 
 tation Portage County, Ohio. Then a battalion of 
 men, all in blazing yellow caps, and then a band of 
 boys ; then another battalion of men ; then another 
 band ; more men with a banner ; another band ; more 
 ensigns ; more banners white this time, with coloured 
 devices ; then another battalion in yellow slouch hats 
 to bring up the rear. Every man kept step. The 
 whole array was so long that each band could hardly 
 carry far enough to mark the time for its own par 
 ticular division. Yet it never lost step or broke its 
 formation. Horse and foot, men and women, a kaleido 
 scope of yellow and red and blue, music crashing, and 
 
132 AT THE SHRINE OF M KINLEY. 
 
 colours flaunting, the long column wound itself in and 
 out and about the streets of Canton. 
 
 When Mr M Kinley came forward in the tabernacle 
 to speak it was too dripping wet to receive them at 
 his porch the place was like a field of buttercups, 
 but buttercups leaping into the air and yelling them 
 selves hoarse. His speech was not long, and, to tell 
 the truth, it was not interesting. He is no orator as 
 Bryan is. Indeed he is almost the least effective 
 public speaker I have heard here. He read his ad 
 dress from a paper held before him, not without a 
 stumble or two : he was distinct and dignified, but 
 after the pageantry and the shouting it was some 
 thing of a fall to the commonplace. He pointed out 
 with great force that Portage County was the finest 
 in the States. But there was neither argument nor 
 eloquence, and though for the peroration he imported 
 a thrill into his voice it did not pass to his hearers. 
 I suppose he and they could not help remembering 
 that he had said much the same to the last county, 
 and would repeat it in a few hours to the next. The 
 next has come in and marched up by now, has been 
 addressed, and has shed itself over the town. As I 
 close this up Canton is still dotted with dandelions, 
 and I hear the boys crying the Evening Kepository. 
 As I said, my engagements compel me to leave by this 
 evening s fast train. 
 
133 
 
 XVI. 
 
 ANTI-ENGLAND. 
 
 CHICAGO, October 3. 
 
 " THE eyes of the soldiers glared upon the people like 
 hungry bloodhounds. The captain waved his sword. 
 The red -coats pointed their guns at the crowd. In 
 a moment the flash of their muskets lighted up the 
 street; and eleven New England men fell bleeding 
 upon the snow. Some, sorely wounded, were strug 
 gling to rise again. Others stirred not nor groaned, 
 for they were past all pain. Blood was stream 
 ing upon the snow; and though that purple staio 
 melted away in the next day s sun, it was never 
 forgotten nor forgiven by the people. ... A 
 battle took place between a large force of Tories 
 and Indians and a hastily organised force of patri 
 otic Americans. The Americans were defeated with 
 horrible slaughter, and many of those who were 
 made prisoners were put to death by fiendish tor 
 ture. . . . The village of Wilkesbarre was burnt, 
 and women and children perished in the dismal 
 
134 ANTI-ENGLAND. 
 
 swamp in which they had sought refuge. . . . The 
 English would often hang a dozen American pris 
 oners without ji moment s warning. . . . More than 
 six thousand American sailors had been seized by 
 British warships and pressed into the hated service 
 of a hated nation." 
 
 All of this, and any amount more to the same 
 purpose, comes from the books whence the Ameri 
 can child imbibes at school his first notions of the 
 history of his country. I bought up an armful of 
 them in a second-hand book - shop, to make sure 
 that everybody was not wrong in imputing to them 
 a great part of the unfriendliness with which we 
 are regarded in this country. For that such un 
 friendliness exists, in greater or less degree, in every 
 class and every quarter of the United States, there 
 is unhappily no doubt whatever. It is not always 
 apparent on the surface, but it is always there be 
 neath it. In the present campaign, it is true, anti- 
 English feeling is not in the forefront ; but that 
 is, in a way, an accident. Hitherto the expression 
 of such feeling hae been something of a Republican 
 monopoly. But in this campaign the free silver 
 people took the cry out of their mouths. "Are 
 you to have your financial policy dictated to you 
 by England ? Did our fathers buy our freedom 
 with their blood that we should surrender it to 
 English gold ? " This is Mr Bryan s appeal in 
 almost every speech. " I would sooner see our 
 
THE INFLUENCE OF HISTORY. 135 
 
 army under a foreign general than our money sys 
 tem under foreign control," I heard him say at 
 Washington, and the crowd repeated it, and said, 
 "That s good." "You shall not crucify mankind 
 upon a cross of gold," in the speech that won him 
 his nomination I have heard it in the phonograph 
 was an apostrophe to England. With all this 
 sentiment on the other side, the Eepublicans are 
 compelled to give Britain a rest this time. It fol 
 lows that Anglophobia is called upon to play only 
 an indirect part in this campaign. But that part 
 it plays steadily. Few speeches are without their 
 reference to Britain, and it is often, implicitly if 
 not explicitly, an unfriendly one. As for any eulo 
 gistic or friendly qualification, such as would usually 
 accompany the mention of the United States in a 
 public speech among us, there is never a hint of it. 
 
 Is that surprising? The Americans have a very 
 keen feeling for their past history ; it is far more 
 alive to them than ours to us. The Crimean War 
 is to us an incident of long ago which we have 
 long ago got, as we think, into its proper focus. 
 We may love Eussia or we may not ; but the Crim 
 ean War is no factor in our disposition either way. 
 Here the Eevolutionary War is as much a matter of 
 personal right or wrong as it was a hundred years 
 ago. It is kept alive by the numberless anniversaries 
 and quinquennials and semi-centenaries in which the 
 Americans take continual delight. Each of the 
 
136 ANTI- ENGLAND. 
 
 sacres recounted in the history-books is commemorated 
 and crystallised for ever by a monument. Whether 
 it was done by us or by Americans, by Indians or not 
 at all, it is all put down to the account of the British. 
 The very name of Washington is a continual reminder 
 that England is the enemy. It is deplorable ; but 
 how could it be otherwise ? Except for small wars 
 with France and Mexico, the United States have 
 engaged in no foreign conflicts but with us. Each 
 popular history is one long inculcation, if not of dis 
 like, at least of distrust and profound suspicion. 
 
 It must not be supposed that every American is 
 itching to be at our throats, nothing of the kind. 
 But even that would be nearer the truth than to be 
 lieve that there is any sentiment of the kind that we 
 have long entertained towards the United States, and 
 which still survives in part the awakening of last 
 December. We talk of this country as our daughter, 
 and of war with it as unnatural, unheard of, impos 
 sible. It may not mean much, but the sentiment, if 
 Platonic, is absolutely sincere. But to the American, 
 the champion of arbitration, war is always a present 
 possibility with anybody at any moment. This 
 seems a paradox, but it is easily explicable. The mem 
 ory of the Civil War is kept alive by every possible 
 device historical articles, official publications, clubs 
 of veterans, clubs of veterans sons, monuments to 
 every leader and every regiment, celebrations of every 
 battle at every anniversary. It is hardly an exagger- 
 
BELLICOSE AMERICA. 137 
 
 ation to say that no American newspaper is published 
 any day of the three hundred and sixty-five which 
 does not contain at least one allusion to the war. The 
 very political demonstrations are organised on a mili 
 tary model ; no nation in the world is more fond of 
 playing at soldiers. War, therefore, to the present 
 generation of Americans is not far enough off to be 
 inconceivable, while it is just too far for the personal 
 recollection of its horrors. And to these twin facts, 
 as well as to a certain impulsiveness and irresponsi 
 bility in affairs, may probably be assigned the belli 
 cose spirit which unquestionably conies over this 
 country from time to time. 
 
 Now, granted the bellicose disposition, why should 
 it not be directed against us ? We may call this 
 country daughter, but it does not call us mother. We 
 were a stepmother at the best, and are no longer even 
 that. Most families of pure English descent have 
 been in this hemisphere so long that they have be 
 come American and nothing else. As for the Ger 
 mans, Irish, Scandinavians, Italians, Poles, and Bo 
 hemians, who make up nearly half of the population, 
 for instance, of Chicago, and more than a quarter of 
 the urban population of the whole country what 
 cause have they to call us mother ? On the contrary, 
 they import the bitter Continental jealousy of us, 
 and here it finds a most congenial soil. The United 
 States is not an old nation as nations go, but after all 
 it is old enough to stand for itself and to do without 
 
138 ANTI- ENGLAND. 
 
 a mother. It wants no pap from us. The sooner 
 we put that fancy out of our heads the better for our 
 mutual understanding. We must be judged on our 
 record in history, and on the showing of American 
 school-books that record is as bad as it could be. 
 
 " The best thing for the relations of the two coun 
 tries," said an American journalist to me, " would be 
 that neither should ever see the other s newspapers." 
 Unquestionably there is a good deal in that. The 
 first thing I saw in New York was a lurid description 
 of the tortures which had driven Dr Gallagher and 
 his fellow-dynamiter mad, reinforced by an illustra 
 tion representing an English warder flogging a half- 
 naked prisoner. It must be remembered that the 
 ordinary untravelled American is almost more blankly 
 ignorant of Europe and its ways than the ordinary 
 European is of America. A newspaper editor asked 
 me whether Canton, with its bare 40,000 inhabitants, 
 was not larger than Sheffield. When an editor thinks 
 thus, his readers will swallow any yarn that anybody 
 likes to pitch about us. There even grows up a de 
 mand for such yarns as illustrative of the depravity 
 of a monarchy, and as an indirect glorification of a 
 free republic. And the demand is most generously 
 supplied. 
 
 It appears that there are many causes of anti- 
 British irritation. " Some day," said my friend, " we 
 shall do another thing that will come to you as just 
 the same cold douche as the Venezuela business." It 
 
A MENACE TO THE C.P.R. 139 
 
 appears that the fishing rights on the Great Lakes are 
 a perpetual cause of friction between the States and 
 Canada. The States side is fished out, and as a 
 consequence the innumerable yachting parties that 
 gather in summer round the Thousand Islands go 
 over to fish on the Canadian shore. " Not a week 
 passes," he said, " without vessels being seized and 
 the Stars and Stripes being hauled down by Canadian 
 officials. The flag has been hissed and insulted in 
 every way. Some day we shall avenge that on the 
 Canadian Pacific Railway. At present they are 
 allowed to carry goods in bond duty-free across our 
 territory. If we revoke that privilege, the loss of the 
 traffic from New England through to the Western 
 States will mean that the C.P.R. can t pay the interest 
 on its bonds. And where will Canada be then ? " 
 
 Another cause of mistrust and jealousy ever in the 
 minds of the Senate s Committee has been some 
 spasmodic attempts on the part of our Admiralty to 
 fortify positions in the Western Hemisphere. Of 
 course it means no more by this than by most other 
 things it does or leaves undone. It has built fortifi 
 cations here and there usually leaving them without 
 armament or garrison, it is true and the United 
 States ask themselves why. Why do we build a 
 graving-dock at Esquimault instead of one at Hong- 
 Kong, where we need it more ? Of course such few 
 Americans as follow foreign affairs know we need 
 graving-docks in both places. But the general result 
 
140 ANTI- ENGLAND. 
 
 is that the States make a dock of their own at Seattle, 
 a few miles from Esquimault, where otherwise they 
 have no earthly use for it. When we fortified Halifax, 
 and Bermuda, and St Lucia over-fortified the first 
 two, as our best authorities hold the United States 
 responded with batteries on their shores and mines in 
 their harbours. And also by building battleships 
 weapons not of defence, but of offence, as they 
 recognise themselves quite clearly. 
 
 It is most frankly recognised by all Americans con 
 versant with foreign affairs that we are not wholly, or 
 even mainly, to blame. They deplore their system of 
 conducting foreign affairs, and with good reason. The 
 foreign policy of the States is conducted in part by 
 the Committee of the Senate upon Foreign Affairs. 
 This Committee is composed of men of experience, 
 who have served upon it four, eight, twelve years. 
 They know their world, they understand their 
 diplomacy, and they do not blunder. But besides 
 these, there is a vast deal of initiative left to the 
 President and the Secretary of State. They are 
 usually American politicians pure and simple, though 
 not always quite pure or quite simple either. They 
 approach foreign problems without knowledge of the 
 usages of international good breeding, and with one 
 eye steadily fixed on public feeling among the electors 
 at home. And almost as surely as they take a prob 
 lem of foreign politics into their own hands, they 
 blunder. 
 
141 
 
 " Well," I said, " it seems to be a string of misunder 
 standings and blunders on each side. But has it gone 
 too far ? Is it come to Mr Olney s theory that any 
 union between us and any part of this hemisphere is 
 unnatural and impolitic ? " 
 
 "That, of course, was unpardonably tactless, and 
 only possible in a country that puts an attorney into 
 a Government office and expects him to become a 
 diplomatist next morning. But if you put it that 
 way, it has gone too far. We do feel that in the 
 future we must not only take up our responsibilities 
 in Central and South America, but that ultimately we 
 must be the only Power in this hemisphere. Every 
 American feels that. You can have all the Old World ; 
 we hope you will. But we must have all the New." 
 
 Then he explained the appallingly strong position of 
 the United States in respect of its future armaments. 
 At present their Government pays 138,000,000 dollars 
 a-year to pensioners of the Civil War. As the men 
 die these pensions fall in at the rate of five to eight 
 millions annually ; in twenty years or so the pension- 
 list will be a white sheet of paper. That means over 
 twenty-six millions sterling a-year, paid already for a 
 military purpose, which can be diverted to armaments 
 without a cent of extra taxation. In twenty years 
 this country will be easily able to turn out a dozen 
 battleships a-year without taking a cent out of any 
 body s pocket. And that means the naval supremacy 
 of the world. 
 
142 ANTI-ENGLAND. 
 
 If we started the United States in this course by 
 some bungling attempt to get our coaling - stations 
 half-fortified, then it was the worst day s work we 
 ever did in our lives. But since the mischief is done, 
 and apparently done irremediably, we had better face 
 the situation squarely and at once. I think the 
 question we ought to ask ourselves is this, Are we 
 prepared to fight the United States immediately, 01 
 are we prepared to take such steps as shall prevent 
 us from fighting them ever ? These are the alterna 
 tives. We cannot afford to let the thing drift. These 
 are the facts. First : we can quite honestly say that 
 we regard the United States as something more than 
 a mere foreign nation ; they have no such feeling 
 towards us, but, on the contrary, by reason of their 
 vivid historical sense, are more disposed to see an 
 enemy in us than in any other nation. Second : the 
 United States possess already nearly double the 
 population of our islands, and the peculiar advantage 
 derived from their falling-in pensions enables them to 
 bear the burden of heavy armament far more lightly 
 than ourselves. Third : they are rapidly awakening 
 from their policy of non-intervention in foreign affairs, 
 and look forward to nothing less than unchallenged 
 domination of every inch of the Western Hemisphere. 
 If these facts are correct, then we must fall back 
 upon one or other of the two alternatives I have 
 suggested. For my own part, whatever may be their 
 faults and foibles, I like and respect the Americans, 
 
THE PRICE OF FRIENDSHIP. 143 
 
 and I shall never cease to feel warmly towards them. 
 I should hate to see us at war with them, but I would 
 rather see that now than see us walking head down 
 to disaster and humiliation a generation or a century 
 hence. As for the other alternative, it needs a deal 
 of self-control and self-abnegation. It is not to be 
 accomplished by fancy treaties for settling by arbitra 
 tion what nobody would ever think it worth while to 
 fight about. If the price of American friendship is 
 to be the ultimate abandonment of all our possessions 
 in the New World, then that friendship will have to 
 prove itself a very valuable asset for use in the Old. 
 It may be asking too much, but if statesmanship 
 could kindly arrange it, I confess I should like to see 
 before I die a war in which Britain and the United 
 States in a just quarrel might tackle the world. After 
 that we should have no more difficulty about America. 
 For if the Americans never forget an injury, they 
 would ever remember a service. 
 
144 
 
 XVII. 
 CHICAGO. 
 
 CHICAGO, October 4. 
 
 CHICAGO i Chicago, queen and guttersnipe of cities, 
 cynosure and cesspool of the world ! Not if I had a 
 hundred tongues, every one shouting a different lan 
 guage in a different key, could I do justice to her 
 splendid chaos. The most beautiful and the most 
 squalid, girdled with a twofold zone of parks and 
 slums; where the keen air from lake and prairie is 
 ever in the nostrils, and the stench of foul smoke is 
 never out of the throat; the great port a thousand 
 miles from the sea ; the great mart which gathers up 
 with one hand the corn and cattle of the West and 
 deals out with the other the merchandise of the East ; 
 widely and generously planned with streets of twenty 
 miles, where it is not safe to walk at night; where 
 women ride straddlewise, and millionaires dine at 
 mid-day on the Sabbath ; the chosen seat of public 
 spirit and municipal boodle, of cut-throat commerce 
 and munificent patronage of art ; the most American 
 
HER MOUNTAINOUS BUILDINGS. 145 
 
 of American cities, and yet the most mongrel; the 
 second American city of the globe, the fifth German 
 city, the third Swedish, the second Polish, the first and 
 only veritable Babel of the age ; all of which - twenty- 
 five years ago next Friday was a heap v ol smoking 
 ashes. Where in all the world can words be found 
 for this miracle of paradox and incongruity ? 
 
 Go first up on to the tower of the Auditorium. In 
 front, near three hundred feet below, lies Lake Michi 
 gan. There are lines of breakwater and a lighthouse 
 inshore, where the water is grey and brown, but be 
 yond and on either hand to the rim spreads the 
 brilliant azure of deep water the bosom of a lake 
 which is also a sea shining in the transparent sun 
 light. White sails speckle its surface, and far out 
 ocean-going steamers trail lazy streaks of smoke be 
 hind them. From the Lake blow winds now soft and 
 life-giving like old wine, now so keen as to set every 
 nerve and sinew on the stretch. Then turn round and 
 look at Chicago. You might be on a central peak of 
 the high Alps. All about you they rise, the mountains 
 of building not in the broken line of New York, but 
 thick together, side by side, one behind the other. 
 From this height the flat roofs of the ordinary build 
 ings of four or five storeys are not distinguishable from 
 the ground; planting their feet on these rise the 
 serried ranks of the heaven-scaling peaks. You are 
 almost surprised to see no snow on them : the steam 
 that gushes perpetually from their chimneys, and floats 
 
146 CHICAGO. 
 
 and curls away on the lake breeze, might well be 
 clouds with the summits rising above them to the sun. 
 Height on height they stretch away on every side till 
 they are lost in a cloud of murky smoke inland. These 
 buildings are all iron-cored, and the masonry is only 
 the shell that cases the rooms in them. They can 
 even be built downward. You may see one of them 
 with eight storeys of brick wall above, and then four 
 of a vacant skeleton of girders below ; the super 
 structure seems to be hanging in air. Broader and 
 more massive than the tall buildings of New York, 
 older also and dingier, they do not appear, like them, 
 simply boxes of windows. Who would suppose that 
 mere lumps of iron and bricks and mortar could be 
 sublime ? Yet these are sublime and almost awful. 
 You have awakened, like Gulliver, in a land of giants 
 a land where the very houses are instinct with 
 almost ferocious energy and force. 
 
 Then go out on the cable car or the electric car or 
 the elevated railroad Chicago has them all, and is 
 installing new ones with feverish industry every day 
 to the parks and the boulevards. Along Lake 
 Shore Drive you will find the homes of the great 
 merchants, the makers of Chicago. Many of these 
 are built in a style which is peculiarly Chicago s own, 
 though the best examples of it are to be seen in the 
 business centre of the city. It ust v s great blocks of 
 rough - hewn granite, red or grey. Their massive 
 weight is relieved by wide rwmd arches for doors 
 
HER DISORDER. 147 
 
 and windows, by porches and porticoes, loggias and 
 galleries, over the whole face of the building from top 
 to bottom. The effect is almost prehistoric in its 
 massive simplicity, something like the cyclopean ruins 
 of Mycenae or Tiryns. The great stones with the 
 open arches and galleries make up a combination of 
 solid strength and breeziness, admirably typical of the 
 spirit of the place. On the other side of the Drive is 
 the blue expanse of lake ; in between, broad roads and 
 ribbons of fresh grass. Yet here and there, among 
 the castles of the magnates, you will come on a little 
 one-storeyed wooden shanty, squatting many feet below 
 the level of the road, paint and washed-out playbills 
 peeling off it, and the broken windows hanging in 
 shreds. Then again will come a patch of empty 
 scrubby waste, choked with rank weeds and rubble. 
 It is the same thing with the carriages in which the 
 millionaires and their families drive up and down 
 after church on Sunday. They are gorgeously built 
 *nd magnificently horsed, only the coachman is hump- 
 ig his back or the footman is crossing his legs. These 
 are trivialities, but not altogether insignificant. The 
 desire to turn out in style is there, and the failure in 
 a little thing betrays a carelessness of detail, an in 
 capacity for order and proportion, which are of the 
 essence of Chicago. Never was a better found vessel 
 spoiled for a ha porth of tar. 
 
 It will be well worth your while again to go South 
 to Washington Park and Jackson Park, where the 
 
148 CHICAGO. 
 
 World s Fair was held. Chicago, straggling over a 
 hundred and eighty -six square miles, was rather a 
 tract of houses than an organic city until somebody 
 conceived the idea of coupling her up with a ring of 
 parks connected by planted boulevards. The southern 
 end of the system rests on the Lake at these two 
 parks. Chicago believes that her parks are unsur 
 passed in the world, and certainly they will be pro 
 digiously fine when they are finished. Broad drives 
 and winding alleys, ornamental trees, banks and beds 
 of flowers and flowering shrubs, lakes and ornamental 
 bridges, and turf that cools the eye under the fiercest 
 noon you bet your life Chicago s got em all. Also 
 Chicago has the Art Building, which is the one remain 
 ing relic of the World s Fair, and surely as divinely 
 proportioned an edifice as ever filled and satisfied the 
 eye of man. And always beyond it is the Lake. 
 Seeming in places almost to rise above the level of 
 the land, it stretches along the whole western side, so 
 that Chicago is perhaps the only one of the world s 
 greatest cities that is really built along a sea-line. 
 Sparkling under the sun by day, or black beneath a 
 fretwork of stars by night, it is a perpetual reminder 
 that there is that in nature even greater and more 
 immeasurable than the activities of Chicago. 
 
 The Art Building aforesaid is now the Field Colum 
 bian Museum, having been endowed by a leading 
 citizen of that name with a cool million dollars. Other 
 gifts, with dividends contributed by holders of exhibi^ 
 
HER INTELLECTUAL EARNESTNESS. 119 
 
 tion stock, brought up the total to half as much again. 
 Chicago has a University hard by, which has come 
 out westward, like Mahomet to the mountain, to 
 spread the light among the twenty-five million souls 
 that live within a morning s journey of Chicago. This 
 University has not been in existence for quite five 
 years; in that time it has received in benefactions 
 from citizens of this place nearly twelve million 
 dollars. Think of it, depressed Oxford and Cam 
 bridge a University endowed at the rate of half a 
 million sterling a-year! Two other prominent Chicago 
 men found themselves in Paris a while ago, when a 
 collection of pictures were being sold ; promptly they 
 bought up a hundred and eighty thousand dollars 
 worth for the gallery of their city. There is hardly 
 a leading name in the business of the place but is 
 to be found beneath a picture given or lent to this 
 gallery. And mark that not only does the untutored 
 millionaire buy pictures, but his untutored operative 
 goes to look at them. It is the same impulse that 
 leads school teachers of sixty to put in a course at the 
 University during their summer vacation. Chicago is 
 conscious that there is something in the world, some 
 sense of form, of elegance, of refinement, that with all 
 her corn and railways, her hogs and by-products and 
 dollars, she lacks. She does not quite know what it 
 is, but she is determined to have it, cost what it may. 
 Mr Phil D. Armour, the hog king, giving a picture 
 to the gallery, and his slaughter-house man painfully 
 
150 CHICAGO. 
 
 spelling out the description of it on Sunday after 
 noon there is something rather pathetic in this, 
 and assuredly something very noble. 
 
 But there is another side to Chicago. There is 
 the back side to her fifteen hundred million dollars 
 of trade, her seventeen thousand vessels, and her 
 network of ninety thousand miles of rail. Away 
 from the towering offices, lying off from the smiling 
 parks, is a vast wilderness of shabby houses a 
 larger and more desolate Whitechapel that can 
 hardly have a parallel for sordid dreariness in the 
 whole world. This is the home of labour, and of 
 nothing else. The evening s vacancy brings relief 
 from toil, the morning s toil relief from vacancy. 
 Little shops compete frantically for what poor trade 
 there is with tawdry advertisements. Street stretches 
 beyond street of little houses, mostly wooden, be 
 grimed with soot, rotting, falling to pieces. The 
 pathways are of rickety and worm - eaten planks, 
 such as we should not tolerate a day in London as 
 a temporary gangway where a house is being built. 
 Here the boarding is flush with the street; there it 
 drops to it in a two-foot precipice, over which you 
 might easily break your leg. The streets are quag 
 mires of black mud, and no attempt is made to 
 repair them. They are miserably lighted, and no 
 body thinks of illuminating them. The police force 
 is so weak that men and women are held up and 
 robbed almost nightly wiJJbin the city limits ; nobody 
 
HER MUNICIPAL SLACKNESS. 151 
 
 thinks of strengthening it. Here and there is a pit 
 or a dark cellar left wholly unguarded for the unwary 
 foot-passenger to break his neck in. All these miles 
 of unkempt slum and wilderness betray a disregard 
 for human life which is more than half barbarous. 
 If you come to your death by misadventure among 
 these pitfalls, all the consolation your friends will 
 get from Chicago is to be told that you ought to 
 have taken better care of yourself. You were unfit ; 
 you did not survive. There is no more to be said 
 about it. 
 
 The truth is that nobody in this rushing, struggling 
 tumult has any time to look after what we have 
 long ago come to think the bare decencies of civilisa 
 tion. This man is in a hurry to work up his tallow, 
 that man to ship his grain. Everybody is fighting 
 to be rich, is then straining to be refined, and nobody 
 can attend to making the city fit to live in. I have 
 remarked several times before that America is every 
 where still unfinished, and unless the character of 
 the people modifies itself with time I do not believe 
 it ever will be. They go half - way to build up 
 civilisation in the desert, and then they are satis 
 fied and rush forward to half - civilise some place 
 further on. It is not that they are incapable of 
 thoroughness, but that in certain things they do not 
 feel the need of it. In Chicago there is added to 
 this what looks like a fundamental incapacity for 
 government. A little public interest and a small 
 
152 CHICAGO. 
 
 public rate would put everything right ; both are 
 wanting. Wealth every man will struggle for, and 
 even elegance; good government is the business of 
 nobody. 
 
 For if Chicago is the lodestone that attracts the 
 enterprise and commercial talent of two hemispheres, 
 it is also the sink into which drain their dregs. The 
 hundred and twenty thousand Irish are not a whole 
 some element in municipal life. On the bleak west 
 side there are streets of illiterate, turbulent Poles 
 and Czechs, hardly able to speak a word of English. 
 Out of this rude and undigested mass how could 
 good government come ? How could citizens com 
 bine to work out for themselves a common ideal of 
 rational and ordered civic life ? However, Chicago 
 is now setting her house in order. It is thought a 
 great step forward that there are now actually one- 
 third of the members of the municipal body who 
 can be relied upon to refuse a bribe. Some day 
 Chicago will turn her savage energy to order and 
 co-operation. Instead of a casual horde of jostling 
 individuals she will become a city of citizens. She 
 will learn that freedom does not consist solely in 
 contempt for law. On the day she realises this she 
 will become the greatest, as already she is the most 
 amazing, community in the world. 
 
153 
 
 XVIII. 
 
 AMONG THE DAIRY-FARMERS. 
 
 FORT ATKINSON, Wis., October 6. 
 
 THE Governor had the air of an eagle. Large hooked 
 nose, deep nostrils, shining black eyes, ragged black 
 hair, and rough black moustache, made up a keen 
 and masterful head poised a little forward on his 
 long, loose frame. Dressed all in black broadcloth, 
 with a wide-leafed black felt hat, hands in pockets, 
 I had first met him striding leisurely down the wide 
 main street of Fort Atkinson. He received me with 
 a grave yet cordial courtesy, as if I had been a long- 
 expected guest, instead of a wandering journalist 
 sticking him up with a letter of introduction at his 
 head in the middle of the street. " No, sir," he said, 
 " don t speak of trouble. You are the guest of the 
 institution, and anything we can do to assist your 
 eyesight, and insight, and back-sight, and around - 
 about sight we shall do." 
 
 We set out, therefore, to walk over thickening 
 heaps of tinted leaves between the white - gabled 
 
154 AMONG THE DAIRY-FARMERS. 
 
 houses, each one set back from the street in the 
 middle of its lawn. The side-walks were laid down 
 with planks as in Chicago ; but what a difference 
 between the trim, sound boards of the country town 
 ship and the ragged, rotten edges of the great city ! 
 As we walked everybody knew the Governor, and 
 everybody greeted him with respect, except the chil 
 dren and the dogs : these laughed at him, and defied 
 his commands, well knowing how safe they were 
 with him. Genial, but always grave, he saluted each 
 labouring man with " John " or " Henry," and they 
 replied with unconstrained friendliness. Yet this 
 man had been charged with the government of a 
 million and a half of his fellow-citizens. He is only 
 an ex-Governor now, technically; but once a Governor 
 always a Governor in this land of Democracy and 
 honorary titles. 
 
 " I am now, sir," he said, " about to show you my 
 creamery. It is not yet finished, but when it is we 
 anticipate that it will be the most complete and the 
 best appointed" I shuddered, for I knew instinctively 
 what was corning "in the world." Shall I ever escape 
 from this tyranny of the biggest thing in the world ? 
 I had at least thought myself safe in Fort Atkinson. 
 Yet among its three thousand people it appears that 
 this country town divides no less thavi three greatest 
 things on earth the coining creamery, a manufactory 
 of dairy instruments, and the canvas- back duck- 
 shooting on a neighbouring lake. 
 
BUTTER AND C2Z8AB*S WIFE. 155 
 
 But the Governor knew what he was talking about 
 when he praised his creamery. Has he not a dozen 
 of them scattered over the south-eastern corner of 
 Wisconsin, collecting the cream of all the country 
 and distributing it as butter to the consumer in 
 Chicago and Milwaukee, to the consumer as far North 
 as Minneapolis and as far South as St Louis ? Does 
 not the Dairyman/ which he owns and edits with 
 the assistance of a small staff of local farmers, print 
 twenty thousand copies weekly and circulate in every 
 English-speaking land over sea? Whether the cream 
 ery will be the finest on earth, or only as fine as 
 you are ever likely to see, I don t pretend to know; 
 but it would be difficult to surpass it, whether for 
 convenience in working or for impregnability against 
 any raiding atom of dirt. " Butter," said the Gover 
 nor, " should be like Caesar s wife above suspicion." 
 
 Next the Governor produced a farmer and bade 
 him drive me out to inspect his farm. Though he 
 might have been my grandfather, he blushed and 
 stammered his coy excuses. " No, no, Governor," he 
 said, "not mine. There are other much better ones 
 for him to see. My fittings are all old and ordinary." 
 "Your fittings," replied the Governor, "are not per 
 haps as high grade as your cows, but I should like 
 for him to see your herd. The buggy is hitched up 
 outside ; take my coat, it is cold ; you had better start 
 right now." 
 
 So we climbed right then into the light -framed, 
 
156 AMONG THE DAIltY-FARMERS. 
 
 loose-jointed, small-bodied vehicle which has adapted 
 itself in the course of evolution to its environment 
 of American roads. The roads even in this, the show- 
 farming district of the States, were nothing more than 
 tracks of rough earth with one side worn a little hard 
 by the traffic. The farm we came to was of about 
 a hundred and fifty acres perhaps fifty over the 
 average of this part of the country with a little 
 patch or two of Indian corn, but nearly all pasture. 
 The barn was over the byre ; they were old, with 
 nothing given to show, and plainly a fair sample of 
 the everyday working farm of Wisconsin. Yet the 
 byre was as fresh and sweet as the epoch-making 
 creamery itself; the beasts were even fed from the 
 floor for fear of foul mangers. At every turn this 
 average farm displayed that combination of ingenuity 
 and the desire to avoid trouble which is known as 
 labour-saving, and from which the English farmer 
 might take a useful example. I do not think that the 
 American farmer, as I saw him, is more industrious 
 or more regardful of details than our own, but he is 
 certainly far more enterprising. "I hardly like to 
 show you these calves," said rny friend ; " they are the 
 result of an experiment. Our theory is that for a 
 milk-cow, or similarly for a milk-bull, you don t want 
 the body of a beef beast so much as room to carry an 
 elegant udder. So we feed these calves very light 
 just skim-milk, and perhaps a little hay or bran so 
 as not to get them fat." We passed a mare and foal in 
 
EXPERIMENTS. 167 
 
 the field ; the foal also was an experiment in breeding. 
 Then we came to a very .lirty field. " That s an ex 
 periment," he said * We tried sowing clover without 
 a nursing crop, bat we didn t mow them weeds off as 
 we should have done, and the result is not very 
 good." 
 
 The combination of enterprising curiosity and 
 neglect to carry the undertaking more than half-way 
 through was very American, and especially, as I 
 should judge, very agricultural - American. But of 
 ingenuity in labour - saving evidences meet you at 
 every turn. The country-side is land-marked with 
 turbines, each one pumping up its quota of water for 
 the stock. Then there are devices to keep up the 
 water-supply during winter, for the thermometer often 
 goes as low as 40 below zero, and the ground has 
 been known to freeze five feet deep. My farmer had 
 another idea to use wood- shavings for litter, and keep 
 all his straw for feed. He also had a separator, 
 worked by a wheel, inside of which a dog ran. 
 Others use a horse for the same purpose, so that 
 separating can begin and finish almost simultaneously 
 with milking. Only in this case a truly character 
 istic touch the dog had run away, and the separator 
 was being worked by hand until somebody had time 
 and inclination to think about looking out for another. 
 The land hereabouts is rich, but stony, and encumbered 
 with the stumps of trees burned down by forest-fires 
 in the Indian time, nearly half a century ago : nobody 
 
158 AMONG THE DAIKY-FARMERS. 
 
 troubles to stub them up or to gather the stones into 
 walls, as has been done in New England. Altogether, 
 the land is not exploited so thoroughly as in England. 
 The farmers will raise two or three crops of maize 
 running, and then put the land down in seeds for a 
 couple or so more. They use none but stable manure. 
 Nor do they feed their beasts high : my farmer s really 
 beautiful Jerseys lived largely on straw and pea-halm, 
 such as we should blush to offer to such well-bred 
 beasts at home. 
 
 The farming of this part of the world is not the 
 real Western article. Wisconsin has been pretty 
 well settled from the days of the Civil War. But 
 though there is very little wheat grown here, the 
 general depression has spread to the dairy produce, 
 which, with a certain amount of maize and oats, is 
 the chief industry of this State. One of the farmers 
 told me that he could raise nothing at all on his farm 
 that would pay the cost of production. Perhaps this 
 was only a farmer s story, for if it was true it was 
 difficult to see why he was alive. But another showed 
 me a list of butter prices for each week during the 
 last fourteen years, and a melancholy tale it told. 
 In 82, at the height of the farming boom, the lowest 
 price was 34 cents, and the highest half a dollar, a 
 pound. Thence it dropped to 40 cents for the top 
 price in spring and autumn and winter, and 20 in 
 the summer. Then 30 and 17; then 30 and 14. 
 This year 14 cents a-pound was the summer price 
 
AGRICULTURAL ECONOMICS. 159 
 
 of the finest butter. To-day it sells for 17 ; last year 
 it was 22 in early October, and ten years ago half as 
 much again. 
 
 It is heartbreaking work ; yet the farmers here 
 are almost solid against free silver. This seems 
 strange, yet the reason is simple enough. Here 
 almost every farmer owns his farm clear of mortgage. 
 Wisconsin never had a boom on the scale of the 
 States across the Mississippi, and what it had is long 
 over and paid for. Burdened with no rent, the farmer 
 can tide over a period of low prices by spending little 
 and growing much for his own use. Moreover there 
 is not a very large labouring population. The cows 
 need few hands to milk and feed them and drive them 
 out and home. Most farmers have a son or two, as 
 rough -clothed and hard -worked as any labourer, to 
 help keep things going. The hired men are usually 
 young and unmarried. They make twenty dollars or 
 so a -month, beside their board with the farmer s 
 family meat of a sort three times a-day, and as much 
 of it as they like. They save money on this, which 
 goes part of the way to a house and farm ; the rest is 
 paid for on mortgage. Seeing that living is as cheap 
 here, where wages run over a pound a-week, as in 
 English counties where the wages of labourers with 
 families are from ten shillings to twelve shillings 
 a-week, there is no insuperable difficulty in paying 
 these mortgages off. My friend drove me round the 
 town as we returned, and told me who lived in the 
 
1GO AMONG THE DAIRY- FARMERS. 
 
 various smartly-painted houses we passed. Here was 
 the manager of the big dairy-supply factory, next 
 door to him a blacksmith, and upon my life I could see 
 no vital difference between the outward aspect of the 
 two. Next to the blacksmith would be a lawyer, and 
 next door to him " well, an old man. I don t know 
 as he does anything in particular. He is generally 
 to home ; when he ain t, I guess he works some at 
 moving houses." For in this land of pilgrimage it is 
 far from uncommon to move a frame-house bodily 
 with rollers and capstan from one site to another. 
 This house used to stand at the corner of the next 
 block ; that was moved across the road to make room 
 for a bigger one. They are built of wood, with an 
 inner skin of very stout paper. They are warmer 
 than brick in the bitter winter, and rather cheaper, 
 while the fire insurance is but a trifle more. And, 
 above all, you can move them about. Every man not 
 only owns his house, but owns it as personal and 
 portable property. 
 
 A community thus organised, for the most part out 
 of debt, and with no periodical drain for rent, is fairly 
 well armed to stand a spell of depression. Moreover, 
 this season, although prices have been low, the yield 
 of everything has been very good. The Governor s 
 lady told me that, desiring to give away the surplus 
 produce of her garden, she could find absolutely 
 nobody who cared to take it. For which reasons, 
 the farmers of this district, which is normally Demo* 
 
THE FARMER AND PROTECTION. 161 
 
 cratic by a large majority, are not only against free 
 silver, but in many cases for Protection. Against 
 free silver, not because they either believe or dis 
 believe in its efficacy to raise prices or lower debts, 
 but because they dread the financial panic which men 
 of business have promised them in the event of Mr 
 Bryan s election : the very men who would have most 
 to gain if their debts were halved by the depreciation 
 of the currency would thus be the first to go down 
 when loans were called in and mortgages foreclosed. 
 For Protection, because they believe that it would set 
 American mills running and American families butter- 
 buying : they want an enlarged home market. The 
 creamery that sent out a thousand pounds of butter 
 daily now sends about seven hundred and seventy, and 
 that at the depressed price. They do not believe that 
 Protection will raise the prices of the manufactured 
 articles they buy, looking to competition to keep them 
 down. When you point out that with Free Trade 
 competition would keep them down lower still, they 
 agree with you, but continue to believe in Protection. 
 All that is true enough in theory, they say, but not in 
 practice. They are just depressed enough to want a 
 change in the tariff, and just prosperous enough to 
 shrink from upsetting the whole financial system of 
 the country. M Kinley offers a change, but not too 
 big a change, and so M Kinley it is. 
 
 My wise and kind old Governor, who thought like 
 Bocrates and talked like Shakespeare and the Bible, 
 
162 AMONG THE DAIRY-FARMERS. 
 
 went off at night on a little trip to make a speech on 
 dairy-work a trifle of five hundred miles into North 
 Dakota. But next morning I walked through the 
 early morning s conflict of burning sun and piercing 
 frost to see his creamery in action. There was his son 
 and partner in rough tweed and thick gloves, toiling 
 at the unlading of blocks of stone for the road to the 
 new building. At the old building the farmers were 
 delivering their milk. One after another they drove 
 up with carts full of big cans now a loose -built 
 American, now a sturdy Scotchman, now a squat 
 little German with matted hair and beard like an elf 
 out of Andersen s Fairy Tales. Nearly all the farmers 
 of Wisconsin are either German or Scandinavian, At 
 a window of the creamery is a pulley and a rope, 
 which hoists up the can from the cart and empties it 
 into a receiver. The receiver stands on a steelyard, 
 which weighs the milk, and as it is weighed a man 
 tests it with a lactometer. Thence it passes into the 
 whirling separators, and thence again the cream is run 
 off into vats, and thence yet again into a huge oblong 
 churn, which takes half an hour to spin it into butter. 
 Next it goes into the working- wheel, with due propor 
 tion of salt, and comes out to be stamped in pound 
 packets, wrapped in paper, packed in boxes, and sent 
 out over hundreds of miles. All these machines are 
 run by a single engine. Meanwhile the farmer has 
 received a weight corresponding to about four-fifths 
 of that of the milk he brought more or less according 
 
SKIM. 163 
 
 to its proportion of cream. He drives his cart round 
 to the back of the creamery, where is a pipe issuing 
 from the wall. He puts his weight into a little box 
 in the wall; it releases a balance, and out into his 
 cans flows back his due share of the skim-milk. That 
 he drives home for his pigs and calves. " I have ex 
 perimented considerable with skim," said a farmer, 
 " and the conclusion I have reached is that a hundred 
 pounds of skim are equal to half a bushel of corn. Of 
 course we don t feed it to the calves alone, but with 
 something to take the place of the fat in the cream." 
 Anyhow, these men do not find the skim-milk left by 
 the separator useless, as many people pronounce it at 
 home. 
 
 But my time was up too soon. With many pro 
 testations of mutual esteem and an undertaking to 
 visit Fort Atkinson again, I left these admirable men 
 hard-up, but not discontented, spending little, but 
 owing less, knowing that they have a sure market at 
 the best rates obtainable for all the cream their cows 
 will give them, and not disposed to jeopardise that 
 market in the hope of a better one. Not so very un 
 fortunate a people, after all, the farmers of Wisconsin. 
 
164 
 
 XIX. 
 THE CAMPAIGN. 
 
 CHICAGO October 7. 
 
 DURING the present campaign Chicago has been in 
 name what it has long been in fact the political 
 capital of the United States. It is nearer the centre 
 of gravity of the country than is New York or Wash 
 ington. The population within a hundred and fifty 
 miles of it, as I have already mentioned, is twenty- 
 five millions well over a third of the whole nation. 
 The middle "Western States, of which it is the centre 
 and metropolis, number 110, or, with Missouri, 127 
 electoral votes out of 447. Added to the solid Kepub- 
 lican East, they have a clear majority. 
 
 Chicago believes and with good reason, if the 
 West can surmount the difficulty of its capricious 
 rainfall and fill itself out with inhabitants that in 
 time she will exceed New York in size and import 
 ance. Her newspapers speak without affectation of 
 " the future metropolis of America." It is an indirect 
 testimonial to her political weight that out of the last 
 
THE HEADQUARTERS. 165 
 
 five elected Presidents four Grant, Hayes, Garfield, 
 and Harrison have been from the central west, and 
 either M Kinley or Bryan will be a new name to the 
 credit of the Mississippi basin, as against the East. 
 There was in this campaign the further reason in her 
 favour that the contest was in a measure between East 
 and West, and hinged entirely on the vote of the dis 
 trict of which she is the pivot. It was at first in 
 tended that the Eepublican organisation should centre, 
 as aforetime, in New York, with branch headquarters 
 at Chicago. But a strong and timely remonstrance, 
 telephoned from a prominent supporter of Mr M Kin 
 ley in this city to the candidate at Canton and to 
 Mr Mark Hanna, his chief of the staff, in Cleveland 
 brought the headquarters westward. The two parties 
 established their main offices on the two sides of the 
 huge Auditorium building, and probably the Eepubli- 
 cans are to-day very glad that they listened to the 
 voice of their monitor in Chicago. 
 
 For that the campaign is won to-day for the Kepub- 
 licans, and won from Chicago, I think there is very 
 little doubt. My own private prejudices are all on 
 the side of the debtor class, but it is impossible to re 
 sist the evidence I have met in and about Chicago. I 
 have talked for a week with men of all parties and all 
 conditions, official and unofficial, and they are virtually 
 unanimous. Of course both parties claim that their 
 canvass shows a majority. Both have mastered the 
 elementary principle of democratic politics that the 
 
166 THE CAMPAIGN. 
 
 mass likes to be on the side of the mass. In its pre 
 ference for the big battalions, if in nothing else, the 
 voice of the people is the voice of God. But the 
 Democrats are modest, and almost apologetic in their 
 estimates ; the Kepublicans are exultant in the re 
 bound from the panic that overtook them on the first 
 news of Mr. Bryan s nomination, and profess that no 
 thing can hurt them except a counter- reaction at the 
 last moment. The wish, often expressed, that the 
 elections were to-morrow instead of three weeks 
 ahead, is eloquent of their satisfaction at the work 
 accomplished in the last six weeks. 
 
 The process of extracting information from the chief 
 of a national headquarters is not dissimilar to entering 
 the ancient Jewish Temple. You first have to face a 
 sergeant-at-arms, and if you pass his scrutiny you are 
 allowed into the Court of the Gentiles, so to speak. 
 The Court of the Gentiles is full of journalists and 
 minor politicians, smoking stumps of cigars and spit 
 ting on the floor. After a due period of probation 
 there, you are led through a wicket-gate I am mixing 
 up Solomon s Temple with the ( Pilgrim s Progress 
 and up to a door. Here your guide gives a low 
 whistle; the door is unlocked by two athletic young 
 men, you pass in, and it is locked behind you. This 
 is a room separated only by a glass partition with 
 another wicket - gate from the Chairman himself. 
 There you serve another and a very severe proba 
 tion. At last you are led through the wicket and 
 
MARK HANNA. 167 
 
 round the partition and, behold, there is a strong 
 post-and-rail between you and the great man. One 
 more wicket to pass, and then you can sit down and 
 talk to him. Thus I went to Mr Mark Hanna, the 
 great merchant, shipowner, coalowner, everything- 
 owner of Cleveland, who is managing this cam 
 paign for Mr M Kinley. My own opinion, based 
 on the reports of friends and foes and my own 
 scanty experience, is that Mr Hanna is about the 
 strongest man in America. Certainly he is the most 
 potent at this moment, for he commands virtually 
 all the money of the country. His enemies call him 
 a blood-sucker of labour ; his friends call him nothing 
 but do what he tells them to. In person Mr Hanna 
 is merely short, ruddy, not thin, with firm lips and 
 a twinkle in his eye, and short side-whiskers that 
 make him look almost like an Englishman. When 
 I saw him he committed himself to the view that 
 he could not afford to lose a State, because he wants 
 so thumping a majority as shall kill free silver for 
 ever. 
 
 If the Kepublicans win, the cause will be very 
 simple and easily explicable. It will be because of 
 the influence of men of business. It is impossible 
 to convey even to the English mind the idolatry 
 with which these States bow down before the man 
 of business. He takes the place of royalty, nobility, 
 caste, education, and virtue together. With us a 
 Cabinet Minister may know nothing of banking, 
 
168 THE CAMPAIGN. 
 
 foreign exchange, life insurance, and we think none 
 the less of him. Here he would be held grossly 
 incompetent if people believed his professions of 
 ignorance, or dangerously designing if, more prob 
 ably, they did not. Now, as soon as the issue became 
 clearly marked between the two parties, business, 
 as was to be anticipated, threw all its weight on to 
 the side of the existing currency and of gold. The 
 Business Men s Sound Money League, the Board of 
 Trade Sound Money League, the Dry Goods Sound 
 Money League, the Commercial Travellers Sound 
 Money League they sprang up in every corner of 
 the country and entered upon an active propaganda 
 for Mr M Kinley. The effect, as I should judge, 
 has been enormous. "Men of business have the 
 best heads in the country," they say in the rural 
 districts, "and they are all against free silver." 
 
 Business went further than sound money leagues. 
 It promised a world-shaking panic if Mr Bryan were 
 elected. You may say that political blackmail is no 
 argument. But it is, and the most powerful of argu 
 ments that can be urged. Moreover, it is not merely 
 blackmail. There can be little doubt enough that a 
 most serious panic actually would follow a Demo 
 cratic victory, and the people who would go under 
 are exactly the farmers and operatives who incline 
 towards free coinage. Even now business is sick 
 almost unto death. Commercial travellers complain 
 bitterly that nobody will give an order until after 
 
"BUY AT PANIC PRICES." 169 
 
 the election ; what few orders are booked are, as a 
 rule, strictly conditional on the election of Mr M Kin- 
 ley. It is true that clothes and machinery and rail 
 way carriages will be wanted whoever is President of 
 the United States. But though stocks are running 
 very low, and prices are very low too, tradesmen 
 reckon to buy what they want, in the event of Mr 
 Bryan s election, at the still lower rates of forced 
 sales and bankrupt stock. A big shop in the very 
 centre of Chicago has a board up to this effect: 
 "Twenty-seven days" or twenty -six, or twenty- 
 five, as the days go by" to the return of prosperity ; 
 buy while panic prices prevail." No doubt that shop 
 knows what it is about, and is not quite so candid as 
 it looks. But the effect of such announcements goes 
 very far indeed. 
 
 As for the real issue of the campaign or, I should 
 rather say, the nominal issue everybody has well- 
 nigh forgotten it. Whether the free coinage of silver 
 at the ratio of 16 to 1 with gold would bring silver 
 up to par, or leave gold at a premium, nobody cares 
 to ask, and, indeed, nobody can give an answer. 
 Assuming a victory for free silver to be on the cards, 
 the question is plainly of essential importance. On 
 the answer depends the share which the two main 
 factors in the silver movement farmers and mine- 
 owners would get respectively out of the booty. If 
 the farmer can sell his wheat to London for gold, and 
 then pay his labourer and his debts in silver below 
 
170 THE CAMPAIGN. 
 
 par, he is obviously the gainer ; but where does the 
 silver-miner come in? If the bullion value of the 
 silver dollar goes up to 100 cents, there is 47 cents 
 profit for the miner ; but what will that profit the 
 farmer ? Professor Langhlin, of the University here, 
 perhaps the best theoretical authority, told me that 
 he thought free coinage would appreciate silver but 
 very little. The President of the First National 
 Bank of Chicago, as good a practical authority as 
 you could find, agreed that it would only send up the 
 silver dollar from 53 to perhaps 60, or at most 65, 
 per cent of the bullion value of the gold. Certainly 
 that looks to give a handsome margin of profit to 
 the mine-owner, and relieves the farmer 35 per cent. 
 But it must be remembered that the world s supply 
 of silver is practically limitless, and that improve 
 ments in transport and in processes enlarge it every 
 day. This gentleman knew of a mine-owner in Mon 
 tana whose tailings had been increased in value from 
 under two dollars to two hundred dollars per ton by 
 a new process of reduction. The Broken Hill Mine 
 has tens of thousands of tons of rejected ore dumped 
 down about the place, where ten dollars worth of 
 silver per ton will not pay for the cost of getting it 
 out. An improved process or a rise in the price 
 might set all this free into the market. So that even 
 if the silver dollar went up to 65 cents, this authority 
 opined that the rush of fresh metal would soon send 
 it down again. 
 
BANK-NOTES AND GOVERNMENT NOTES. 171 
 
 Another factor in the M Kinley reaction has been 
 the revolting Democrats who nominated Generals 
 Palmer and Buckner at Indianapolis. Leaving their 
 party on the currency issue alone or, as they put 
 it, being left they claim that they restored confi 
 dence at a critical moment both to the world of 
 business and to the Republican party. That claim 
 might doubtless be pressed too far, but it is in the 
 main well founded. A prominent article of their 
 political creed is that they wish to do away with 
 the present system of Treasury notes, to take the 
 Government out of the banking business, and rely for 
 money upon notes issued by banks under proper 
 Government supervision. I asked the President of 
 the First National Bank his view on this point, and 
 he altogether concurred. " A bank currency/ he said, 
 " is based on real assets. If I issue a bank-note I hold 
 something against it. It may be only your note" I 
 shuddered inwardly "but then you have a bag of 
 beans at home against that. If somebody comes and 
 asks me to pay my note, I ask you to pay yours, and 
 you sell your bag of beans. But when the Govern 
 ment issues notes it has nothing behind them. It 
 really means that it has not the money to pay its 
 debts just now, and when you present the note it must 
 raise money, either by taxes or by issuing bonds. If 
 by taxes, it takes something which has already got its 
 place in the system of credit. If it issues bonds it is 
 wasting the credit in time of peace and quiet that it 
 
172 THE CAMPAIGN. 
 
 might want in war or some other emergency. Now, 
 if the banks issued the currency, and there was a drain 
 of gold to pay our trade debts abroad, I should call on 
 you to pay your note. You would sell your beans. 
 Other people would do the same, prices would go 
 down, and then the foreigner would want to be paid 
 in beans instead of cash, and the drain of gold would 
 correct itself. The Government can t do that, and 
 the gold reserve in the Treasury only serves to 
 frighten people when it runs low. What the Govern 
 ment does is to be periodically raided for gold to 
 redeem its Treasury notes. The gold reserve goes 
 down, and to replenish it and restore public confi 
 dence, Government issues interest - bearing bonds. 
 These it sells for gold, and as soon as the gold is in the 
 Treasury, of course there is another raid and another 
 issue of bonds. And so on to infinity, the Govern 
 ment steadily losing money all the time." I asked 
 my banker if he thought Congress would seize this 
 occasion to put the currency on a sound basis. He 
 didn t think they would have the grace to do that, and 
 certainly Mr M Kinley has breathed no hint of it. 
 What they would do, he thought, was to raise the 
 revenue, which at present lags some way behind ex 
 penditure, to a surplus of fifty million dollars or so, 
 and with the aid of this gradually contract the notes 
 in circulation. But there would certainly be a duty 
 on wool within two years, and another on coal. 
 That brings us to the third chief factor in Mr 
 
PROTECTION AGAIN. 173 
 
 M Kinley s probable success Protection. I wrote at 
 the beginning of my scamper through the States that 
 Protection had nothing to do with this contest. That 
 was more or less true at the time ; but as the silver 
 question was worn threadbare, Protection has been 
 thrust steadily forward. The maintenance of the gold 
 standard was too negative a programme for these days 
 of depression. No democracy, least of all this de 
 mocracy, likes to vote a blank negative. The country 
 in general has a grievance against the laws of supply 
 and demand, and thinks it time Congress did some 
 thing in the direction of their repeal. For most of 
 these free silver would be going too far, but there is in 
 this country no holy horror of Protection. And after 
 all why should there be ? This is a huge nation, but 
 in many ways it is still a very young one. And how, 
 without Protection, is a young country to create indus 
 tries for itself ? Do not even the political economists 
 not that they matter say the same ? There remains, 
 it is true, the fact that the Senate has a clear silver 
 majority of half-a-dozen or so. The gold Democrats 
 reckon on this majority for a great triumph. They 
 expect this silver majority to blockade Protectionist 
 legislation, and at the same time they expect from Mr 
 M Kinley s election the restoration of confidence and 
 the revival of business. They hope to be able to go 
 to the country in two years and say : " We were right ; 
 the other Democrats said that what you wanted to be 
 prosperous was free silver; the Republicans said it 
 
174 THE CAMPAIGN. 
 
 was Protection : you have had neither, and yet, with 
 the restoration of confidence, you are prosperous. 
 Return, therefore, yourselves to Free Trade and us to 
 power." 
 
 But other people, as well or better informed, expect 
 a new M Kinley tariff at once. The Silver Senators 
 have been bought for Protection before, and may be 
 again. Mr M Kinley himself as I was told by a 
 gentleman who had as much as anybody to do with 
 determining him to stand by the gold currency, and 
 should he succeed will have had much to do with his 
 success has no apprehensions about the Senate. Mr 
 M Kinley is an old parliamentary hand. " You don t 
 know," he is reported to have said, " the power of free 
 and unlimited patronage." President Cleveland has 
 set himself to bludgeon down opposition, and has thus 
 only strengthened it. President M Kinley would con 
 ciliate it over a cigar, and, if necessary, give it an 
 embassy. And so the manufacturers of Pennsylvania 
 and the Middle West anticipate Protection immediate 
 and abundant. A duty on coal would hit Nova Scotia 
 and British Columbia, though wheat-ships must always 
 carry ballast on their voyage to the States, and why 
 not coal ? But the wool tax would damage Germany, 
 so I am assured, far more than us. There are mills in 
 the Kaiserland running night and day which never 
 sell so much as a pair of socks outside the United 
 States. To protect the beet-sugar of California and 
 Nebraska, again, and the cane - sugar of Louisiana, 
 
ANTI-GERMANY. 175 
 
 means shutting the market, not upon Mauritius and 
 Deinerara, but upon Germany, which produces six 
 tons to their one. 1 don t suppose that England 
 would welcome a new M Kinley BiJl with illumina 
 tions and votes of thanks. But if it hit Germany 
 harder than it did us, we might recetvs it pitJi the 
 more Christian resignation. 
 
176 
 
 FOOD AND DRINK. 
 
 CHICAGO, October 9. 
 
 I AM not a chameleon I cannot live on air. Neither 
 am I a Napoleon, to go without my rightful sleep. 
 Yet the air of America would make a chapoleon, as 
 one might say, of anybody. 
 
 Never was there such a stimulating, bracing air 
 meat and intoxicating drink together. You would not 
 call it a kindly, perhaps not even a wholesome, air. 
 I have found it drop from 94 to 47 in two days. I 
 am told it will not uncommonly sink from 75 to zero 
 in a night. An air like this will find out the weak 
 spot and finish you before you have found it out your 
 self. Yet it is made of tone and vigour, and in the 
 strength of it you can go for days and nights, eating 
 little and sleeping less, and feel like a lion at the end 
 of it. However, to return to the point, no man can be 
 quite a chameleon, though in point of changing colour 
 a good many politicians here come very near it. Even 
 in America one must eat, and what ? Let us then 
 
THE ICE- WATER HABIT. 177 
 
 treat of American food, for it is of more importance 
 than much free silver. 
 
 Next to air the staple American food is water. Ice- 
 water is the first refreshment served at every meal. It 
 is more indispensable than a napkin, and the waiter 
 who will keep you waiting ten minutes for bread will 
 rush wildly for the bottle if your ice-water sinks half 
 an inch below the brim of the glass. Eing a bell at any 
 hour of the day or night a panting attendant dashes 
 in with ice-water. Sip, sip, sip men, women, and 
 little children go pouring the noxious stuff into their 
 insides. The effect of this ice-water habit on the 
 national constitution can only be most disastrous. 
 Water is an unwholesome drink at the best of times ; 
 it is doubly unwholesome in many American cities, 
 where municipal government is largely left to the friends 
 of contractors, and trebly and quadruply unwholesome 
 when iced. I do not suppose that ice-water can be 
 set down, except indirectly, as a cause of insanity and 
 crime. But I will bet my head that it kills more 
 people in the United States in a month than alcohol 
 does in twelve. 
 
 To rivet the shackles yet more firmly on the victim 
 of ice-waterism, it appears that until lately there was 
 a strong feeling in this country against drinking wine, 
 spirits, or beer at meals. To drink in the presence of 
 ladies was much the same kind of manners as lighting 
 a pipe between soup and fish. An Englishman who 
 had lived in the country for twenty years told me 
 
178 FOOD AND DRINK. 
 
 that he was once cut at a fashionable watering-place 
 because he drank a bottle of beer with his lunch. The 
 result of this etiquette was that men bolted raw whisky 
 afterwards at the bar, to the complete destruction of 
 such stomachs as the ice- water had left. 
 
 So far as I can see, this convention must now be 
 dying out. Of course, it has bred in many or most 
 Americans a distaste for any other alternation of meat 
 or drink, and men appear, quite apart from motives 
 of good breeding, to prefer taking their drink by itself 
 to taking it at meals. Indeed, most men appear to 
 abstain quite cheerfully from alcohol altogether. While 
 I have seldom gone into a bar at night without finding 
 somebody who had had at least enough, I have never 
 seen a bar crowded, and should say that the average 
 moderate-drinking American drinks a good deal less 
 than the same class of drinker in England. For one 
 thing, the air is a brisk stimulant in itself, whereas 
 with us it is often the opposite. Another noticeable 
 fact is that even when an American orders wine or 
 beer with his dinner, he seldom touches it until he is 
 almost done. But I should think this habit of not 
 drinking at meals is dying out. Everywhere you can 
 get thanks, perhaps, to the influence for good of three 
 million German-Americans most excellent light beers 
 of the Pilsener type ; the best come from Milwaukee 
 and St Louis, but they are good everywhere. As for 
 American wine, the only article in common use is called 
 Catawba a rather finicking perfumed kind of stuff, 
 
BEEF AND MUTTON. 179 
 
 somewhat suggestive of white Capri. European wines 
 are only for the millionaire. 
 
 But to table. " I m looking forward to a good chop 
 when I get to New York," said an American to me in 
 the Campania s saloon. "This English meat makes 
 me tired." I was a child in American patriotism then : 
 when he said with the quiet of absolute certainty that 
 American meat was infinitely better than English I 
 believed him, and also looked forward to New York. 
 There I found indeed American meat bigger than Eng 
 lish the national passion for size runs even to its 
 cutlets but very far from better. I found it coarse 
 in grain, insipid in flavour, usually tough, and invari 
 ably half raw. Only, in justice to the butchers of both 
 hemispheres, I ought to point out one thing. Every 
 body knows that you can get good meat in London if 
 you like to take the trouble, but that in nine cases out 
 of ten the proprietors of hotels and restaurants find it 
 simpler not to take the trouble. I expect that my 
 American s experience in our land had been largely 
 confined to these, while my own in his has, for the 
 most part, been similarly restricted. I have met bril 
 liant exceptions in cutlets and steaks here in Chicago. 
 And in private houses, so far as I can judge, the same 
 rule holds good as with us. You may say of beef and 
 mutton as of government that every free man gets 
 just as good as he deserves. 
 
 But he would be a tame, inglorious explorer who 
 should confine himself to familiar beef and mutton in 
 
180 FOOD AND DRINK. 
 
 America. What, on the other hand, is to be the 
 reward of the intrepid correspondent who, in the 
 interests of his readers, has faced in its native wilds 
 the broiled Philadelphia squab on toast, or bearded 
 the little-neck clam on shell ? I have done both. I 
 ate the squab in triumph, but recoiled before the little- 
 neck clam. But if the clam appears to Eastern jaws 
 composed entirely of rather sickly gristle, there is the 
 blue-point oyster rich with a flavour he never retains 
 on our side of the ocean, and without the superfluous 
 flesh of the Whitstable. Of new fish there are legions : 
 blue fish, red fish, white fish, weak fish singularly 
 well-named, for he tastes of nothing at all breakfast 
 fish, pan fish, and half-a-dozen more that I have for 
 gotten. Some of these I may have duplicated, not 
 knowing the same fish under another name ; for 
 instance, I could appreciate no substantial difference 
 between red fish and white fish least of all in colour 
 while a breakfast fish may not improbably be called 
 so on a menu because you have it for breakfast. The 
 pick of the rush basket is the blue fish, a philan 
 thropist whom we should do well to cultivate at home. 
 He blends in a happy combination the close fibre of 
 the mackerel and the oily opulence of the salmon. 
 Salmon I have not found good perhaps from not 
 knowing where to look for it ; and trout, the noblest 
 fish that swims, is frequently spoiled again with 
 notable exceptions in Chicago by the sloppy way in 
 which it is served. 
 
SWEETS. 181 
 
 The pilgrimage through dinner is not marked by 
 any very striking incident until you reach the sweets. 
 Of birds the awesome squab above-mentioned is the 
 most noticeable ; he is rather in the nature of a spatch 
 cocked pigeon. There are also such things as reed- 
 birds and doe-birds, which bear a resemblance to quails. 
 Grouse are a good deal larger than with us, but less 
 like game and more like poultry. There are such new 
 vegetables as green Indian corn sweet and fresh, but 
 only farinaceous after all and fried egg-plant, an 
 admirable natural imitation of fried egg. But dinner 
 is not seen at its most characteristic until the moment 
 of sweets. They descend upon you in dozens fruit- 
 pies, jam-tarts, cream-tarts, custard-tarts, varieties of 
 the meringue tribe, biscuits, cakes of every bewildering 
 description. Men as well as women eat heartily of 
 them, and why not ? They go well enough with ice- 
 water. I seem to notice that the Americans love 
 strong flavours and violent contrast in the domain of 
 food, as elsewhere : their sweets seem sweeter than 
 ours; their salt fish is uncompromisingly salt, and 
 their pickled pork remorselessly pickled. But as for 
 sweets, let me own my fall. Despising them, like all 
 male Britons over twenty who have mastered the art 
 of smoking, I yet ventured upon them out of a purely 
 scientific curiosity. I first endured, then pitied, then 
 embraced. The explanation of my decline is that, 
 whatever else the American dinner may have been, 
 the sweets are always good of their kind. Even 
 
182 FOOD AND DRINK. 
 
 pumpkin -pie though, to be sure, it does not taste of 
 anything in particular presents a yellow, saccharine 
 succulence that soothes and distends. There are 
 varieties of peach -pie which recall and surpass the 
 masterpieces of Vienna, and cocoanut-pie is almost 
 as potent. As for custard-pies, cream-pies, and all 
 the rest of them briefly, they tempt a man to 
 forget his manhood. 
 
 The order of the American dinner is, in the main, 
 like unto that of our own. I have indeed detected 
 pine-apple fritters lurking between entrde and joint ; 
 why, I had neither the curiosity to inquire nor the 
 enterprise to determine by experiment. I suppose it 
 is a parallel to the German eccentricity of eating jam 
 with beef, and another token of the American leaning 
 towards contrasting flavours. I also note as German 
 the country custom of supping on a hot dish with 
 cold meat, salad, jam, hot cakes, and tea and coffee. 
 Hotels in town, on the other hand, which provide a 
 late dinner of some pretension, economise on lunch 
 by providing only one or two hot meats by way of 
 oasis in a desert of cold. These hotels, it is hardly 
 necessary to explain, pursue what is called the 
 American plan, lodging and boarding you at so 
 much a -day. 
 
 The service of the American meal is plainly a 
 development of the quick lunch, as profusely adver 
 tised in the business portion of New York. Its 
 direct object is to stuff the maximum of diversified 
 
QUICK LUNCH. 183 
 
 food into the human stomach in the minimum of 
 minutes; its indirect effect is to ruin the human 
 digestion in the minimum of years. With this aim 
 all the various dishes are served together. Not 
 until you have seen a young man barely out of his 
 teens surrounded by soup, fish, three meats, four 
 vegetables, two salads, two sweets, fruit, ice-cream, 
 ice- water, coffee, sugar, cream, cruets, a little jug of 
 spoons, and Worcester sauce, can you appreciate the 
 full horror of the quick lunch. It was an affluent- 
 young man I saw thus begirt, for I am afraid the 
 poor clerk does himself very badly. I have not 
 assisted personally at a quick lunch, and I am not 
 intending to do so ; but, being stranded one night 
 down - town in New York, waiting for a train, I 
 attended some of the shops where the clerk sups. 
 You can hardly spend more than fifteen cents, but 
 then you can get nothing more than oysters, cold 
 meat in some only pies, bread, and coffee or tea. 
 I worked through three in a quarter of an hour, and 
 at the end I had to go down into a German beer- 
 dive to stay my stomach with stout. 
 
 But the American breakfast is the thing. Americans 
 rise early ; you seldom find a man who is not through 
 his breakfast by eight. This life-giving air makes 
 you hungry an hour or two before you could look 
 at food in Europe. First you have fruit wonderful 
 pears that look like green stones and taste like the 
 fruit of the Tree of Life and peaches. In this 
 
184 FOOD AND DRINK. 
 
 country you call your sweetheart, not a daisy, but 
 a peach. Then mush, so they call oatmeal porridge 
 or wheatmeal porridge or hominy porridge, a noble 
 food with the nectarous American cream. Then 
 fishes and meats, sausages and bacon and eggs. 
 Then strange farinaceous foods which you marvel 
 to find yourself swallowing with avid gust Graham 
 bread, soda - biscuits, buckwheat (or griddle) cakes, 
 with butter and maple -treacle. It is magnificent; 
 but it is indigestion. All the same, I look forward 
 to the day when America shall produce an invention 
 that will let me go across the Atlantic for breakfast 
 every morning. I shall take a season ticket 
 
185 
 
 XXI. 
 
 THE BIGGEST PARADE ON EARTH. 
 
 CHICAGO, October 9. 
 
 YES, sir," said the millionaire, " I was then clurk- 
 ing at five dollars a-week in a dry-goods store. There 
 came the fire, and the store was burned down, so next 
 morning I went out to look for something to do. I 
 couldn t afford not to be working. I found a man who 
 offered me a job of picking out bricks from the burned 
 foundations at one dollar twenty cents a-day. But 
 the bricks were so hot that I couldn t hold them in 
 my hands. As I was going back to the room where 
 I boarded to get a pair of gloves, I met a gentleman I 
 knew who manufactured safes. His house of business 
 was on the West side and hadn t been burned down. 
 Everybody was coming to him for safes to put their 
 valuables in ; others loss was his gain. He had more 
 trade than he knew what to do with, so he asked me 
 to come as his cashier for a dollar a-day. I went." 
 He smiled a smile of half-wistful reminiscence as he 
 looked round his parlour. There he was on velvet 
 
186 THE BIGGEST PARADE ON EARTH. 
 
 cushions, with a grand piano and a shameless Italian 
 novel side by side horror! with Mr Eichard le 
 Gallienne s Prose Fancies/ and with Heaven knows 
 how many dollars in the bank. And there, if any 
 merit lies in sturdy and resourceful effort, he deserved 
 to be. 
 
 This little bit of retrospect is interesting, not merely 
 as showing that if you are ready to salvage bricks at 
 seventeen you will be a millionaire at forty-two, but 
 also as a hint and an explanation of the devotion with 
 which Chicago men regard their city. By their un 
 tamable energy they have built her up from a heap of 
 ashes in their own lifetime to be great and wealthy 
 and pulsing with virility. The gentleman I have 
 quoted would be honoured and loved in any capital of 
 the earth, not for his wealth and ability, but for his 
 sweet and even saintly character. You had not as 
 sociated saintliness with Chicago ? Probably not. 
 But he associates everything he is or ever has been 
 with Chicago, and it would never enter into his mind 
 for an instant that there is in the world any city 
 where he would be, or where he would wish to be, 
 more in place than in Chicago. He has grown up 
 with her, and he loves her like a mother. 
 
 Therefore the men of Chicago resolved that the 
 twenty-fifth anniversary of her destruction by fire 
 should not pass without such a demonstration as 
 should convince the world that she is very much more 
 alive than ever. Incidentally, it was determined that 
 
CHICAGO MAKES AN EFFORT. 187 
 
 this demonstration should also blazon abroad her de 
 votion to the cause of that sound money on which she 
 has grown to be what she is. Now, when Chicago 
 makes up her mind to do a thing she does it as it 
 has never been done before. If it is not the biggest 
 thing of its kind the world ever saw why, then 
 Chicago has lost a day. The American people love 
 display above all things ; it is nothing to be anything 
 unless you can express that being so as to impress it 
 sensibly upon others. So the day was made a public 
 holiday, not by the decree of authority what cares 
 Chicago for authority ? but by the unanimous resolve 
 of the leading citizens. Board of Trade, Stock Ex 
 change, banks, offices, shops, factories, street railways, 
 all took a day off; they hardly knew themselves in the 
 unaccustomed calm. Arid Chicago gathered herself 
 together into the heart of the city for a festival of 
 superlative display such as had never been seen before, 
 and should never be seen again until Chicago saw fit 
 to surpass it. 
 
 I had seen at Canton something of the American 
 method of electioneering, of the appeal to the senses 
 of the voter, hitting him hard in eye and ear with 
 colour and noise, so that the dullest imagination can 
 not fail to appreciate the strength of the great machine 
 which asks him to become part of it. I had seen in 
 Chicago evidences of ambitious energy which con 
 vinced me that what there was to be done in the way 
 of colour and sound and pageantry would be done 
 
188 THE BIGGEST PARADE ON EARTH. 
 
 here. But I had also seen something of the exagger* 
 ation into which American impressionability is wont 
 to betray itself. When I went to the office of the 
 Chicago Times -Herald, which was my hospitable 
 home for the day, I expected to see a big thing per 
 haps a matter of two or three hours but not a thing 
 whose bigness would transcend my powers of estimate 
 and comparison. The parade was timed to start at 
 ten, and only a few minutes afterwards its head 
 appeared between the dense phalanxes of people 
 crushed on to the pavements, and the swarming faces 
 that lined every building, from the lowest window to 
 the roofs and chimneys, like ants in a hill. First 
 came a squad of mounted police; then mounted 
 buglers ; then rank on rank of mounted citizens. 
 With parti-coloured sashes slung round their bodies, 
 gold cords about their hats, white gauntlets, new 
 bridles, and brilliant saddle-cloths, they looked as 
 disciplined and rode as regularly as the police. Pres 
 ently came by the organiser of the parade, riding 
 alone like a general, and after him a small staff and 
 a mounted standard-bearer. Then slowly there ad 
 vanced a colossal American ensign, spread out like 
 a canopy from side to side of the broad street: it 
 seemed to be rolling along by its own motion. It was 
 a mass of umbrellas some blue with white stars, 
 others red and white, cunningly marshalled so that 
 from above they presented a giant counterfeit of the 
 stars and stripes. Then came the demonstrators 
 
O r THE 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 189 
 
 themselves. First, grey-bearded veterans of the war, 
 glittering with medals and badges, a little stiff with 
 years, but every inch of them soldiers yet. Band 
 after band crashed past scarlet and blue, crimson 
 and gold, lace and feathers. Between them, now 
 eight abreast shoulder to shoulder, now four abreast 
 in open order across the whole street, advanced bat 
 talion after battalion of marchers. They were regi 
 mented either according to political clubs or to the 
 prominent business houses of Chicago ; each carried 
 its own standard. The great drapery establishment 
 of Marshall Field & Company led the way six 
 partners of the firm riding abreast, and after them 
 shop-walkers, salesmen, cashiers, porters, office-boys, 
 all in rank and file, and all in step with the music. 
 Firm followed firm, club followed club. Some wore 
 red badges, some blue, most gold ; some carried scarlet 
 umbrellas, some orange. Others wore slouched hats 
 of saffron colour, others again short capes of ultra 
 marine or vermilion. All kept their formation and 
 marched in step. After about three-quarters of an 
 hour, when the procession had already become an 
 army, began to arrive the principal attraction of the 
 show the floats, as they call waggons bearing sym 
 bols of trade or groups of allegorical figures. Here 
 Vulcan with attendant Cyclops, here nothing but a 
 huge earthen pipe, there a model of one of the great 
 buildings, there again a car swarming with starred- 
 and- striped Uncle Sams six horses, eight horses, 
 
190 THE BIGGEST PARADE ON EARTH. 
 
 ten horses, with floating streamers and gilded hoofs. 
 Horns boomed and megaphone speaking-trumpets 
 magnified the din tenfold. And at intervals along 
 the line of march were telephone - receivers into 
 which enthusiasts decanted their cheers, to be carried 
 five hundred miles into Mr M Kinley s study at Can 
 ton. Was there ever such a blend of the infantile 
 and the heroic? 
 
 Eleven o clock : they were still stepping briskly out 
 to the music. Twelve o clock : they were still yelling 
 "He s all right!" as they passed the picture of M Kin- 
 ley. One o clock: they were just getting into their 
 stride. At half -past one I took a short adjournment 
 and not unnecessary sustenance. At half-past two I 
 went back to the window : there was this inexhaust 
 ible parade sweeping on as doggedly as ever. Club 
 followed club, factory trod on the heels of factory. 
 More bands, more floats, more colours, more mega 
 phones, always more gold. A detachment of bakers 
 in white ; a company of glass - blowers with glass 
 swords ; a troop of broom - makers shouldering gilt 
 brooms. Then came the contingent of the great 
 packing houses ten thousand marchers from these 
 alone. Their feature was the stockyards brigade, all 
 riding and all in capes that may have been paper, 
 but looked like cloth -of -gold hard cattle-drovers 
 and slaughterers sitting their fine horses carelessly. 
 Every ward in the city, every trade that man ever 
 aet his hand to, had sent its sons to swell this pro- 
 
STUNNING! 191 
 
 digious pageant. Three o clock : was it ever going 
 to end ? We had long ago worked through the list 
 of organisations coloured on the card, yet tramp, tramp, 
 rumble, rumble, crash, crash, the men and the wag 
 gons and the bands came pouring on. It was an army 
 corps, two army corps, a whole nation on the march. 
 
 At last! A six-horsed car one blaze of gold, and 
 the crowd had broken the dam and was surging over 
 the street. Twenty-five minutes to four : it had taken 
 five hours and ten minutes to go past the Times- 
 Herald office. By my own estimate nearly four hun 
 dred men had passed every minute; allowing for all 
 intervals the Herald s calculation of eighteen to 
 twenty thousand an hour cannot have been too high. 
 A hundred thousand men ! More than thirteen miles 
 of procession ! Capitalist worth two hundred million 
 dollars ! But why struggle with figures so vast that 
 they have lost their meaning. The parade would 
 have failed if its object, if its import, be grasped and 
 weighed by figures. The mind was stunned and dead 
 ened by the vastness of it. The eye was blinded with 
 colour, the ear deaf with music, the head dazed with 
 the effort to get it all into focus. There was more 
 colour and more noise and more men than you could 
 conceive were in the whole world a world of brilliant 
 bunting and brass and horses, and moving men, men, 
 men, till you gave up and let it sweep over you and 
 conquer you and absorb you, annihilated into its 
 titanic self. 
 
192 THE BIGGEST PARADE ON EAETH. 
 
 " If M Kinley gets all that of votes out of this 
 county," said the lift - boy when I crawled home, 
 feeling too small a worm ever to turn again, " he ll 
 be our next President sure." There you see it at 
 work. That lift-boy never went to a political meet 
 ing, never read a political tract. They have dis 
 covered in this country the effects of the spectacular 
 and the auricular, and they have applied it on a 
 characteristically vast scale. You can disregard ar 
 gument ; you can ignore self-interest ; you can for 
 get country ; you can even refuse a bribe. But you 
 cannot fail to see and hear and to be struck wellnigh 
 resistless by so imperious and masterful appeal to 
 the senses of your body. 
 
 The Democrats know that as well as anybody else. 
 So they have organised a counter -demonstration as 
 colossal as they can lay their hands on for the even 
 ing, and as I write it is trooping up beneath my 
 window. On the horizon the red and white lights 
 shine steadily over the black solemnity of the Lake. 
 Nearer in is the broad belt of muddy waste that 
 Chicago is going to make into a park when the 
 City Council gives back the money it has embez 
 zled. And right below us is Michigan Avenue, dark 
 with heaving masses of men, flickering with gold 
 and silver and red fire, and volleying cheers, hoarse 
 and shrill, far over the solemn water, and up to 
 unanswering heaven. All poor men these. No two 
 hundred million dollars here. Not but what they 
 
THE POOR MAN S PARADE. 193 
 
 know how to play the game as well as anybody. 
 They have the advantage of the darkness and illu 
 mination, and the keen night breeze. They have a 
 row of sheeted ghosts with such boding inscriptions 
 as " Murdered in Pennsylvania by Carnegie." It 
 seems to me I may be wrong, I am trying to be 
 fair that there is more life, more sincerity, more 
 devil in this muster than in the other. Men said 
 that factory hands were compelled to demonstrate 
 this morning for fear of their employers. It was 
 untrue of many thousands, I doubt not; yet some 
 looked sullen it may probably have been true of 
 some. But of this night s enthusiasm there can be no 
 doubt; the affair goes in a whirlwind of cheers from 
 start to finish. It may be smaller, though even this 
 is a great army ; it takes an hour and a half to pass 
 my window, and cannot number less than thirty 
 thousand men. And if smaller, it is more exuberant. 
 It may be less overwhelming, but it is more inspirit 
 ing. I am getting enthusiastic myself. There may 
 be fewer bands, but how they ring ! and was there 
 ever an air like " Auld Lang Syne " ? There may be 
 fewer cavalry, but how they step ! and was ever any 
 created thing so beautiful as a horse ? There may be 
 less colour, but how the torches dance ! There may 
 be fewer cars, but how the silver blazes in the eye of 
 the calcium lights ! So they go blaring and flaring, 
 tossing and roaring and maddening into the darkness. 
 All poor men, in this city of corn and meat and 
 
 N 
 
194 THE BIGGEST PARADE ON EARTH. 
 
 dollars. May be coarse men and ignorant men. They 
 may be very wrong ; they may be compassing their 
 country s ruin and their own. But they all feel that 
 there is something they want something they ought 
 to have and have not and in a vague, blind way 
 they are striving to get it. Thousands of them think 
 how tragically ! that it is within their grasp to 
 day. All poor men and poor they will remair 
 Sometimes dully patient through the night of indi 
 gence ; sometimes shouting at the phantom of false 
 morning; sometimes, it may be, raving and seeing 
 red But poor they will remain. 
 
195 
 
 XXII. 
 
 OUT WEST. 
 
 DBNTOR, October 12. 
 
 I AWOKE yesterday morning to find the train rumbling 
 alongside a broad coffee-coloured river which threaded 
 its way among long coffee-coloured shoals and sandy 
 eyots. It was the Missouri, and when presently we 
 creaked over it I was in the West indeed. 
 
 All Sunday the train rolled across the plains of 
 Kansas, for an American train, being a string of 
 very long and heavy carriages, does roll instead of 
 jumping like so many of ours: it is the difference 
 between the movement of the ocean-liner and of the 
 row-boat. The plains of Kansas are not an interest 
 ing spectacle after the first half-dozen hours or so. 
 Once the bed of an inland sea, their long rise and 
 fall affords at one moment a prospect of miles, the 
 next of a few hundred yards. But miles or yards, it 
 is all the same dim brown-green fields, mostly divided 
 by wire fences, but now and again by a grove of yel 
 lowing half -naked trees or a tall straggling hedge. At 
 
196 OUT WEST. 
 
 intervals the black skeleton of a little coal-mine 
 varies, but hardly embellishes, the prospect. Farm 
 houses, of the portable frame-built kind, are dotted 
 here and there. In the middle of the enormous 
 fields they look curiously like toys. About them are 
 a few head of cattle or horses to be seen, but most 
 of the land is plough. The rich black loam grows 
 fine crops of maize and wheat, when only it will 
 remember to rain. Kansas is the first wheat-growing 
 State of the Union ; the fourth in oats, and the fifth 
 in Indian corn. This year it has rained rather too 
 much than otherwise, but a little excess is preferable 
 to the ruinous droughts of the preceding years. So 
 that, with a good harvest and wheat bounding up on 
 the Chicago market, Kansas has done well. 
 
 But Kansas is not happy. From the conversation 
 of its various sons who joined us and left us during 
 the long Sunday, I gathered that Kansas is convinced 
 that there is something somewhere in the universe 
 that is radically wrong. She was over -boomed in 
 the early 80 s like all the West, and to-day she is 
 paying or, more correctly, owing for it. Vast sums 
 were borrowed to put up houses that nobody wanted, 
 and to till land that had better have been left virgin. 
 So that when India suddenly took to producing wheat 
 in hundreds of millions of bushels, and Australia and 
 the Argentine in tens of millions, and when the price 
 went steadily down in consequence, Kansas began to 
 feel that all was not as it should be. 
 
THE SORROWS OF KANSAS. 197 
 
 Then came the awful fact that the rainfall was such 
 that every other drop failed utterly. Kansas was the 
 more convinced that something was rotten. To put 
 it right instead of irrigating, which with time is 
 the main hope of the West she set to work fever 
 ishly upon all kinds of curious political experiments. 
 An American asked me a few days ago whether we 
 did not feel it very inconvenient to have to make 
 any experiment in government by the unwieldy means 
 of an Act of Parliament: was it not far easier and 
 safer to let individual States make trial of a novelty 
 and see how it worked ? No doubt an awful example 
 is at times convenient to all of us, but how about the 
 example ? Kansas has been the drunken helot of 
 American politics. " Here s a law ; let s enact it," 
 has been its continual watchword. Kansas tried 
 Prohibition, and, if it is any satisfaction to it to 
 know, thereby put me to some inconvenience. But 
 the native Kansan still knows where to get drunk 
 if he wants to, and cutting off the supply of whisky 
 on earth did nothing to increase the fall of water 
 from heaven. It tried a certain amount of female 
 suffrage with no more effect. In the last few years 
 it has given its allegiance to four new political 
 parties. These were the Farmers Alliance, the 
 National Alliance, the People s Party, and the 
 Silver Party. None of them did any good, and now 
 for what none of her politics could do Kansas has to 
 own her obligation to the despised laws of supply 
 
198 OUT WEST. 
 
 and demand. But this election is too early for 
 Kansas to own any such thing. She is saturated 
 with the doctrine of free silver. The towns, Re 
 publicans told me, will go handsomely for M Kinley, 
 but then there are no towns. The outlying farmer is 
 largely beyond the reach of the campaign of education 
 which the gold men are conducting, and though Kansas 
 is being rapidly purged of economic heresy, there will 
 be enough left to ensure a victory for Mr Bryan. 
 Small blame to Kansas for desiring any change, since 
 with crops failing, prices tumbling, and mortgages 
 foreclosing, her lot has been one of hard anxiety. 
 
 Next morning we were in Colorado. The sleepers 
 were white with frost, but the sun was half a furnace 
 at six in the morning, and the sky was all blue. We 
 were rolling, rolling now across the raw prairie. Wave 
 after wave it spread out boundlessly on every side, a 
 pale silvery grey under the frost and the dazzling sun 
 shine. No room for agriculture here. Seen in the 
 bulk the prairie is much like a smooth, undulating 
 sea; but if you look closer it is more like a glacier 
 a glacier of caked sand, wrinkled with a thousand 
 crevasses in which streams should run, but which 
 only rarely contain so much as a little ooze. The 
 surface is dappled with tufts of sage- scrub small 
 bushes that at a distance resemble bleached heather. 
 Occasionally appeared sparse blades of coarse grass, 
 but the rare steers and horses had a right to be thin. 
 Nothing flourishes in this arid wilderness except 
 
DENVER. 199 
 
 prairie-dogs. Hundreds of these brown-furred little 
 devils, a mixture of rabbit and guinea - pig, were 
 scampering up and down in the sun, or perking them 
 selves bolt upright at the edge of their holes, comically 
 like a dog begging, to look at the train as it rolled 
 past them. Presently in the distance the ground 
 began to rise into hills, and then the hills into moun 
 tains. We did not climb them, but turned northward 
 and ran through country where the grey of the prairie 
 began to be relieved with the yellow of deciduous 
 trees, and a green field or so of clover. So we ran 
 into Denver, the mining capital of the West, the Queen 
 City of the Plains. 
 
 The Queen City of the Plains, if I may presume to 
 criticise on a very brief acquaintance, is more plain 
 than queenly. A very well-made, well-arranged city 
 beyond doubt, but undistinguished. Solid brick-built 
 houses, neither too large nor too small, she has in the 
 central part, and agreeable residences. Her tram-car 
 system and electric-lighting system are not to be im 
 peached. In one respect I noticed Denver has risen 
 superior to American carelessness. Many cities are 
 apt in places to leave the names or numbers of their 
 streets to be remembered by the inhabitant, or con 
 structed out of the inner consciousness. Denver puts 
 a couple of boards at each street corner, with not only 
 the names but also some of the more important or 
 necessary businesses between that corner and the 
 next. But, alas ! even Denver is human, for many of 
 
200 OUT WEST. 
 
 the corners have indeed the brackets for such boards, 
 but no trace of boards for the brackets. The inhabit 
 ants appear, at first sight, to gain a precarious liveli 
 hood by selling each other railway tickets at reduced 
 rates. Outward from the business centre Denver is 
 much the same as other American cities. Perhaps a 
 little more beautiful than Chicago, in that the subur 
 ban roads are oftener planted with trees; perhaps a 
 little less so, in that the acres of railroad track and 
 factory in smaller Denver are less diluted by dwelling- 
 houses. Much the same, in that the outskirts of both 
 are dingy and dusty and sooty, and largely over- 
 populated with Germans. 
 
 But if Chicago has her lake to redeem her, Denver 
 has her mountains. No city can be wholly unpleasing 
 where you can look up from a street of railway ticket- 
 offices and mining agencies to see a great mountain 
 filling the end of the vista. It has been remarked by 
 some profound observer that the spectacle of high 
 mountains suggests majestic calm. It does. But how 
 majestically calm mountains can look I never knew 
 till I saw the Kockies from the Argo Smelting Works. 
 On one side a maze of railway lines and row on row 
 of freight - trucks formed the foreground. Behind 
 them was a large, low parallelogram of dingy brick 
 and unpainted wood and dull slate ; out of it rose 
 more than a dozen fat chimneys, vomiting clouds of 
 impenetrable blackness. The sun was smeared with 
 the dirtiness of it ; the air was poisoned with the 
 
THE ROCKIES AND THE SMELTER. 201 
 
 reek of it, and throbbed with the pulse of machinery. 
 On the other side rose the Eocky Mountains. In 
 front were the naked brown sides of the lower eleva 
 tions harsh in colour and savage in outline. Behind 
 them towered summits fading from brown to a more 
 kindly grey, and beginning to blend the wildness of 
 their shape with the clouds. And yet further rose 
 the white peaks above the clouds, basking serene 
 and unperturbed in the glory of their neighbour, 
 the sun. "In the world there is nothing great but 
 man," I repeated with my face to the factory, and 
 then looked at the mountains. They did not trouble 
 to rebuke me. What is the smelter to them ? They 
 looked down on that table-land without interest when 
 the smelter was born, and they will look down without 
 condescending to triumph when it dies. 
 
 Why did I plough through sand and Germans to 
 the Argo Smelter ? I haven t an idea, unless it was 
 the weird of the conscientious journalist, which never 
 lets him get away from what he cannot understand. 
 There was next to no work going, and nearly all the 
 plant was still and cold. It was even pathetic to see 
 the sparse workmen strolling about the great sheds 
 built to keep twenty times their number busy. But 
 I saw them crushing silver ore, and it was about the 
 grimmest industrial operation there could be. No 
 delicacy of contrivance or sheen of racing steel, but 
 heavy grimy machinery, crushing the blocks of 
 metallic rock by sheer brute force. Then I saw the 
 
202 OUT WEST. 
 
 powder being raked to and fro in a square furnace, 
 and being raked round and round in a circular furnace. 
 Finally it comes out, as I understood, in a form in 
 which it can be dissolved in hot water and thence 
 precipitated as pure metal. At this point I saw 
 some rubble in a wooden box, and turned to ask a 
 workman whether any use could be made of it. He 
 said it could; that was the silver. That the silver 
 that dirty -white crumbling mess; half dust, half 
 coagulated like frozen snow ! That was it : there 
 was about 200 ounces of it, he said, strewn about 
 the box, and that was the crushings of over ten tons 
 of ore. And was that the stuff that all this herculean 
 and vulcanic machinery had been tearing its heart out 
 and burning its ribs through to force from the rock ? 
 That the stuff that is shaking this whole country 
 as it has hardly been shaken before? Away, vile 
 dross ! 
 
 But that is not the view of Denver. Denver is 
 the centre to which comes for smelting the gold and 
 the silver, the copper and lead, and the other metals 
 which are woven into all the mountains of Colorado. 
 Colorado calls herself the Silver State, and of right, 
 for she puts out more than one-seventh of the whole 
 production of the world. But silver is not what it 
 was. In the last three years it has gone down nearly 
 50 per cent. What was paying ore then is now only 
 fit for the dump-heap. " Talk of silver barons," said 
 a mining engineer ; " you could count them nowadays 
 
"A BEAUTIFUL BUSINESS ONCE." 203 
 
 on the fingers of your two hands. I don t suppose 
 there are half-a-dozen silver-mines now running, bar 
 those that produce gold as well. It was a beautiful 
 business once. But now you can t be surprised if 
 people that are in want cry out for some change, 
 even if it is not quite sound economically." I told 
 him I was not surprised the less so since I per 
 ceived that he meant to vote for free coinage at 16 
 to 1 himself. So will they all in Colorado. Who can 
 blame them I 
 
204 
 
 XXIII. 
 
 A STRIKE. 
 
 LEADVILLE, October 18. 
 
 EVERY American is at heart an Anarchist. He hates 
 constraint, he hates regulation, he hates law. The 
 most elementary arrangements of an ordered com 
 munity, as we should think, are to him irksome and 
 intolerable encroachments on his liberty. But there 
 is one point on which the conservatism of America 
 would put the very Czar to shame. The American 
 will tolerate much, but he will have no tampering 
 with the rights of property. He may have nothing 
 himself, but he will guard the havings of others with 
 all the jealousy a man usually gives only to his own. 
 In a land where you may be a pauper to-day and a 
 millionaire to-morrow ; where it is the commonest 
 experience to meet a man who has made, and lost, 
 half-a-dozen fortunes in half-a-dozen different pro 
 fessions in as many years here a man looks upon 
 the wealth of others as held in trust for himself, and 
 will suffer no diminution of its sanctity. Socialism, 
 
THE THREE BOOMS OF LEADVILLE. 205 
 
 Anarchism, any " ism " that smacks of confiscation 
 or nationalisation, is a far more heinous horror in this 
 land of democracy than anywhere in the king-ridden 
 East. 
 
 It is so with strikes. In our own country a strike, 
 even if the strikers be palpably in the wrong, will al 
 ways command the sympathy of a great many people. 
 Except in extreme cases, I am free to own that it 
 automatically commands mine. In this country it 
 does nothing of the kind. Hardly a word have I 
 heard in apology for the Leadville strikers from any 
 person I have come across. Everybody reprobates 
 them mercilessly ; everybody exults over the measures 
 that now appear to be ensuring their defeat and 
 ruin. 
 
 It must be confessed that theirs is a pretty bad 
 case. Leadville, you must know, is a mining camp 
 right up above the clouds in the Kocky Mountains. 
 It is so called because it produces lead, but its first 
 real boom was in gold. When the gold was to some 
 extent played out, two drunken miners, acting under 
 the divine inspiration of their condition, set to digging 
 one night in a place where no sane man would have 
 swung a pick. Of course they discovered carbonates 
 soaked in silver beyond the dreams of avarice. There 
 upon Leadville had a second boom. That was about 
 eighteen years back ; in the meantime the camp had 
 developed resources in the way of iron and copper 
 also. About half-a-dozen years ago it had a third 
 
206 A STRIKE. 
 
 boom this time in gold again. Leadville, in short, 
 appeared singularly blessed of Heaven. The depres 
 sion which had menaced our fair city, as the preface 
 to the local directory finely remarks, faded away, and 
 the sun of prosperity spread its invigorating beams 
 around. 
 
 But within a few months of these words came the 
 strike. Silver had gone down steadily, until Lead 
 ville could afford to work hardly an ounce of it. 
 Thereon it seems that the Miners Trade Union seized 
 the auspicious occasion to demand a rise in wages. 
 About two-thirds of the men got three dollars a-day, 
 and the rest two and a half. Three pounds a- week 
 you would have called good enough wages in bad 
 times, even though prices are somewhat higher in a 
 mining camp eleven thousand feet above sea -level, 
 where your heart bangs on your ribs if you run up 
 stairs, than in the cities of the plain. But the mine 
 managers, though they promised the rise when silver 
 went up to 70 cents (I think it was) an ounce, set 
 their faces resolutely against any increase at the time. 
 
 The real question appears to have been whether 
 the Colorado miners should come under the Western 
 Union, like those of Montana and Idaho, or whether 
 this should remain a non-Union State. The men 
 struck; the managers got in blacklegs. Then one 
 night, some five weeks ago, two of the mines were 
 attacked. One was set on fire and wrecked ; the 
 other, though the strikers used dynamite freely, was 
 
STRIKE Oil PUBLIC HOLIDAY? 207 
 
 pluckily defended. The assailants were driven off. 
 Nobody knows or cares, apparently exactly how 
 many men they lost. The leaders of the Union were 
 thereon charged with murder, and thrown into prison, 
 where they now are. The President of the Union 
 has utterly disappeared from the face of the earth 
 whether he was shot in the attack on the mine or is 
 now a fugitive from justice, again nobody knows or 
 cares. Leadville was occupied by troops in force, 
 infantry and cavalry, a 12-pounder and gatlings, and 
 is so occupied at this day. 
 
 The camp presents a strange contrast to-day be 
 tween black hostility and Western good-fellowship. 
 The whole company of the strikers was lounging 
 along the main street, well dressed and well fed to 
 all appearance, and in perfect good-humour, as if the 
 men in their graves with bullets through their hearts 
 had been sharing the sunshine with them. It all 
 looked more like a holiday than a strike. Presently 
 three fire-engines, each fireman in a different uniform, 
 came galloping down the ploughed field that forms 
 the central avenue of Leadville. Everybody followed 
 without excitement, of course, for what is a mere 
 fire in Leadville ? but with an evident intention to 
 make the most of a lucky windfall in the way of 
 entertainment. The truth was that the Governor 
 of Colorado had come up to inspect the military 
 arrangements, and the firemen had been turned out 
 to amuse him. The public disappointment was my 
 
208 A STRIKE. 
 
 gain, for I had an opportunity of seeing the forti 
 fications of Leadville. 
 
 Not knowing a soul in the place, I had followed 
 my usual method of calling upon the leading news 
 paper. The invariable result followed first, that I 
 was interviewed ; and, secondly, that I received the 
 honorary freedom of the town. And for social life 
 except on dynamite nights give me Leadville. Be 
 fore the huge fire in the hall of the hotel was the 
 whole camp the mine manager dressed for all the 
 world like one of the strikers, the local editor in 
 corduroy trousers, the officers of the army of occupa 
 tion in their workmanlike blue uniforms, the Governor 
 of the State being introduced to the postman. Into 
 this order of equality and friendliness I was initiated, 
 and the officers hospitably asked me to join them as 
 part of the Governor s escort. So I hired a mustang, 
 or burro, or broncho, or whatever it was to me it 
 looked just like a plain horse, and on the whole it 
 behaved as such fell in behind the staff-officers, and 
 rode off to inspect the camp. 
 
 If anybody is apt to think little of the United 
 States militia by reason of the everyday looseness of its 
 equipment and the apparent easiness of its discipline, 
 he is in a fair way to be badly surprised some day. 
 I know nothing of military affairs, but it was im 
 possible for the greenest greenhorn to see these men 
 without recognising them as the real stuff that wins 
 battles. Spare and active, hard as nails, with intelli 
 
A FORTIFIED MINE. 209 
 
 gence and determination stamped on every face, on 
 the best of terms with their officers and each other, 
 they were quite plainly the men for days of forced 
 marching with straight shooting at the end of it, and 
 shooting right on to a finish. Up here in the clouds 
 with spells of four hours sentry-go in the icy nights, 
 with no air to breathe, the senior surgeon told me that 
 he had only found half-a-dozen men unfit for duty in 
 almost as many weeks. 
 
 Then we rode up to the mines. The first was a 
 shapeless chaos of charred beams, broken metal, over 
 turned cylinders, wires strewn underfoot, machinery 
 hanging in blackened shreds. Here the storming 
 party had succeeded in dynamiting their way in and 
 firing an oil-tank. The next mine was a fortress, 
 nothing less. Eamparts of rubble, stout abattis, pent 
 houses of heavy beams the place looked impregnable 
 to anything but artillery or dynamite. Here, too, the 
 defences had been broken through by bombs, but a 
 fierce fight followed round the oil -tank, and the 
 strikers were beaten off. The chimneys of the works 
 were like sieves with bullet - holes, and there were 
 deep and frequent dints in the woodwork. In this 
 mine we saw the double row of roughly-sawn plank- 
 built bunks where the men sleep, and the long table 
 laid out for them to eat on : they only leave the 
 precinct of the mine at the risk of their lives. We 
 saw the pickets on guard and the garrison drawn 
 up inside the fort. The soldiers were only doing their 
 
 
 
210 A STRIKE. 
 
 duty, quietly and loyally, as they are bound to do. 
 But here also were the imported non-unionist miners, 
 prisoners in their workshop, earning a living in deadly 
 peril every minute of the day and night. It was not 
 wonderful that they showed something of the fierce 
 ness of the wild beast when it has tasted blood ; that 
 one or two of them exulted in the slaughter they had 
 done already, and asked no better than to have a 
 chance of killing again. Whether such a chance will 
 be given them nobody can tell. The town is as 
 orderly as a Sunday-school to-day ; but the sullen 
 calm may be furious storm to-morrow. And there 
 is always dynamite. At the third mine a Samson 
 of pumping and hoisting machinery the hills of 
 rubble had been made into escarpments and bastions, 
 with a system of block -houses and electric lights 
 placed so as to command every approach. It would 
 be so easy to steal up with dynamite. If you approach 
 you will be fired on ; briefly, Leadville is in a state of 
 siege, not to say civil war. Several hundred stand of 
 arms have been confiscated, but signals have been seen 
 flashing from mountain to mountain at night, and 
 little caches of dynamite have been found near the 
 mines. "There may be one under our feet at this 
 moment," suggested an officer, cheerfully. 
 
 We scrambled up and down the stony steeps from 
 mine to mine for good part of the afternoon. Trotting 
 back past the little frame-huts, I saw more than one 
 black-browed miner lowering at his door, and more 
 
TO THE DEATH. 211 
 
 than one muttering woman calling off her children as 
 we passed. In this grim deadlock Leadville waits for 
 the cruel winter. With uncalculated treasures be 
 neath her feet, and the clammy, cold clouds pressing 
 down on her head, she waits for aching frost and 
 hunger to settle the matter one way, or cold steel 
 and hot lead and dynamite to settle it the other. No 
 surrender ; no compromise ; no pity. The owners 
 mean to starve the miners to death ; the miners mean 
 to blow the owners to atoms. It is not the first 
 strike of the kind in America, nor the second, nor 
 will it be the last. And as a dark menace for the 
 future a billion silver questions are not to be named 
 in the same breath with ifc 
 
212 
 
 XXIV. 
 
 AMONG THE MORMONS. 
 
 SALT LAKE CITY, October 16. 
 
 * Bur Brigham Young was a big man ? " I expostu 
 lated. 
 
 "He was a natural boss/ said the Judge, "but 
 not near so big a man as his people made out. He 
 pretended to receive telephone messages from the 
 Almighty, and they did what he told them every 
 time. But he was a bully and a braggart; he 
 hadn t any real courage. He was not a Mahomet, 
 sir." 
 
 "But he did a lot here." 
 
 " He had a lot of men working. It looks wonder 
 ful to make a garden out of a desert; but it was 
 the water did it. A tribe of civilised Indians down 
 in New Mexico had done it before, and the Spaniards 
 had always irrigated. I guess you won t find any 
 thing here in the way of irrigation they haven t got 
 in Egypt. And you can water this land in a year; 
 
MORMONISM: BIKTH AND DEATH. 213 
 
 back East it took a man a lifetime to clear his patch 
 of forest." 
 
 That was the view of a man who had fought Mor- 
 monism for twenty years and had beaten it. For 
 Mormonism is beaten to-day ; as an organisation of 
 life apart from the Gentile world Mormonism is quite 
 dead. The white six-spired temple, which took forty 
 years to build, with walls nine feet thick, and every 
 corner wrought out of a single stone, is no more than 
 its mausoleum. 
 
 From the first emigration in 1847, when Salt Lake 
 City was the only bit of civilisation West of the 
 Missouri, and wellnigh as hermetically sealed from 
 the outer world as was America before Columbus, 
 there were Gentiles in Utah. They were tolerated, 
 but no more. But in 1868 came the Union Pacific, 
 and the huge bell that tolled from its engines was 
 the death-knell of Mormonism as Church and State 
 in one. The Gentiles increased : year by year there 
 were contests for local offices, and though the People s 
 Party as the Mormons called themselves always 
 had the victory, the minority of the Liberals, or 
 Gentiles, grew steadily smaller. At last, in 1889, 
 came a State election in which the Mormons won 
 the State, or the territory as it then was, but in Salt 
 Lake City itself were in a minority of 41. Next 
 spring was fought the hottest municipal contest 
 American politics ever saw. Every man in the city 
 was working on one side or the other. The Liberals 
 
214 AMONG THE MORMONS. 
 
 carried their ticket by 700 votes, and the Mormon 
 game was up. They disbanded their party ; two 
 years later the Liberal party was similarly called 
 together and disbanded. Utah divided itself into 
 Republicans and Democrats like the rest of America. 
 Mormonism abandoned its claim to identify Church 
 with State. It gave up polygamy. The revelation 
 from Christ and Brigham Young suspending it was 
 hastened, say certain Gentiles, by the imminent pas 
 sage of a bill disfranchising the husband of many 
 wives. The sharp line between saint and sinner was 
 rubbed out, and Mormonism became a mere sect like 
 any other. 
 
 I thought I should like to have a Mormon view 
 of the matter. So the Secretary of the Chamber of 
 Commerce obligingly rang up the Church of Jesus 
 Christ of the Latter -Day Saints on the telephone. 
 In a few minutes I was presenting myself to a lofty- 
 browed, silver-haired old gentleman whether he was 
 apostle, high priest, or elder I did not gather, but 
 for picturesqueness we will call him an apostle. He 
 was very far from admitting that his Church was 
 dead. A continuous stream of missionaries leaves 
 Salt Lake City every month. " I myself went round 
 the world on missionary work when I was twenty-two," 
 he said. " Of my thirteen sons three are missionaries. 
 We have three thousand Mormons in London, and 
 many more in Europe, especially in Germany and 
 Scandinavia. With the Latin races we have never 
 
215 
 
 made progress, and we have abandoned Palestine and 
 Turkey for the present. They do not right now offer 
 a favourable field for our work." 
 
 I said I could understand that right now they did 
 not. " When I went round the world," continued the 
 apostle, " I took neither staff nor scrip with me. You 
 know we believe in the exact words of the Scripture 
 without any spiritualising or interpretation. And I 
 never begged a dollar or lacked a meal of victual. I 
 was kind and loving, and temperate and exemplary, 
 and the Lord always sent what I required. It needed 
 faith a good deal of faith sometimes but faith came 
 along. And the Lord provided." A missionary is 
 chosen and sent out at a word from the authorities 
 of the Church. Farmer, mechanic, lawyer, man of 
 business, he must sell out and go. And when a 
 convert comes home, as they call Utah, the Church 
 similarly decides where he shall go and what he 
 shall do. There are Mormon colonies now in British 
 Columbia, Idaho, Wyoming, Arizona, New Mexico, 
 and Mexico proper in which last they are suspected 
 of preserving a surreptitious polygamy. The colonial 
 system led us on to talk of the organisation of the 
 Church. " It s a beautiful organisation," he said. 
 
 And so it is. I doubt if even the Church of Eome 
 can show a better. There is a first president, and two 
 others the first, an old gentleman of ninety, named 
 Woodruff, who was among the pioneers of 1847. 
 This father of his people was out of town, and I 
 
216 AMONG THE MORMONS. 
 
 could not meet him ; it is recorded that on arriving 
 here, fifty years ago, his first act, before breaking his 
 fast, was to plant half a bushel of seed potatoes, and 
 I am sure I should have loved him. One of the 
 other presidents is a nephew of "Joseph Smith, the 
 prophet," as it was curious to hear the apostle call 
 him. Under them are twelve apostles, and then the 
 seventy, as you may read in the New Testament. 
 The ordinary saints are brigaded into subordinate 
 seventies, with sevens over them. The Church is 
 supported by tithes, paid religiously in kind down to 
 the tenth egg. For purposes of Church administra 
 tion the country is parcelled out into states and 
 counties, wards and precincts, for all the world as 
 in the political hierarchy. If two Mormons have a 
 dispute it is brought before the teacher, or priest, or 
 deacon ; if he fails to reconcile the parties, the bishop 
 of the county has a try. If they are still recalcitrant, 
 the matter comes before a council of fifteen. Six 
 range themselves on the side of each, and one out of 
 each six acts as attorney ; the three remaining mem 
 bers form the court of appeal. If this method does not 
 succeed in recommending a decision, there remains an 
 appeal to the three presidents, whose word is final. 
 
 "Then yo u discourage litigation in the civil courts?" 
 I said. " We discourage it, and we have very little of 
 it," answered the apostle. " I wish you had time to 
 visit the penitentiary here ; you would not find a 
 Mormon in the place. The warder told me so the 
 
"YES, SIR; POLYGAMY IS EXPENSIVE." 217 
 
 other day, and he is a non-Mormon we do not speak 
 of outsiders as Gentiles among ourselves and so are 
 all the judges here, so there is no prejudice in our 
 favour. Yet in the cities like this or Ogden, our young 
 people are exposed to temptations. There are drink- 
 ing-saloons and other undesirable houses." I said 
 there were in most cities I knew. " But there were 
 none before non-Mormons came here," he said quickly. 
 " In parts of this State, where the whole population is 
 Mormon, you will find they use neither tobacco nor 
 tea nor coffee, much less saloons or houses of ill-fame. 
 Our system of polygamy saved us from that. We 
 have been much maligned because of our polygamy," 
 he went on. " We practised it for that and for the 
 sake of children. If it had been for lust there were 
 other less expensive ways. You know your children 
 can follow you to Heaven, but you can t take your 
 mining shares and your railroads. In the Bible, you 
 will remember children are always held the greatest 
 of blessings. 
 
 " I have done six months imprisonment," he broke 
 out suddenly, wheeling round in his chair. " I have 
 been imprisoned for maintaining my wives and chil 
 dren ; and yet no more than two or three per cent 
 of our people ever made polygamous marriages." " I 
 suppose they couldn t afford it," I said. " Yes, sir," 
 answered the apostle, " polygamy is expensive. Poly 
 gamy is very expensive, sir. It runs," he continued 
 musingly, " into a great many thousand dollars." 
 
218 AMONG THE MORMONS. 
 
 I am afraid I almost laughed to see this truly 
 apostolic father stroking his venerable heard arid 
 moralising on the expense of polygamy. But I 
 contrived to keep a straight face as the polygamous 
 veteran continued his exposition. "We were doing 
 a great work," he said, " if they had only let us alone. 
 We were trying a great experiment. Our aim was 
 to produce an entirely perfect race no physical 
 deformity, no ugliness, no vice, no crime." 
 
 "I don t quite see how you expected to avoid 
 physical deformity, at any rate," I said, " unless it 
 could be done by temperance and by the influence 
 of climate " for the climate of Salt Lake City is the 
 softest, benignest, and most exhilarating in the world. 
 
 "Partly by that and partly by polygamy," he said. 
 
 " By polygamy ? " 
 
 "Yes, sir. Our theory is that woman is above all 
 things the mother. We treat her as mother, not as 
 wife, during the period when her maternal duties 
 to her offspring are most sacred, trying all the time 
 to surround her by scenes of kindness and gentleness, 
 love and holiness. That must have its influence, sir. 
 You see it in our horses and our dogs ; why not in 
 our women ? As for sentimental love, that is 
 rubbish, never lasts longer than the honeymoon, 
 sir. Good day, sir. I wish you could have stayed 
 to see more of us. Peace be with you." 
 
 Polygamy, in short, is over and done with. That 
 barrier broken down, Mormons and Gentiles now 
 
THE COMPROMISE. 219 
 
 live together in peace, share the State and municipal 
 offices without distinction of creed, meet in business, 
 and to some extent socially. Occasionally, of course, 
 there comes up bitter recrudescences of the twenty 
 years struggle, but forbearance is the rule. Men who 
 had more than one wife live only with the earliest 
 wed, though they honourably maintain the others. 
 " And if an old man, who s been accustomed to poly 
 gamy all his life, breaks the law now and then," said 
 a Gentile, " why, people don t try to see him." 
 
 The present harmony is in the highest degree 
 creditable to both sides. But the younger genera 
 tion of Mormons, I was assured, were sincerely glad 
 to be quit of polygamy. The young women who had 
 come in contact with Gentiles never took kindly to 
 the mother -and -nothing -but- a -mother theory; the 
 young men with whom the Mormon typewriter or 
 shop-girl walks out are almost invariably Gentiles. 
 The Mormon young men have ambitions, and see 
 how polygamy would stand in their way. "Most 
 everybody s on this earth for money," explained a 
 leading citizen with engaging directness, and the new 
 generation of Mormons realises, with the Apostle 
 quoted, that there is no money in polygamy. 
 
 United at last, Utah has gone forth prospering and 
 to prosper. The credit for this may be fairly evenly 
 divided. Salt Lake City has a matchless situation: 
 grey mountains keep off the winds, the emerald lake 
 gives health, the cloudless blue gives life and activity. 
 
220 AMONG THE MORMONS. 
 
 That selection is due to the founder, Brigham Young, 
 In the broad, clean regularity of its streets, their 
 even paving, the brooks that cool and cleanse them 
 on either side, the avenues of trees, the complete 
 system of telephones and electric tramways, the 
 solidly commodious, if uninspiring, business buildings 
 in all these Salt Lake City has no peer in America, 
 West or East. All that has been done in the six 
 years since the election that seated the Gentiles in 
 the civic chair. In those six years the population 
 of the city has doubled. On the Mormon side of 
 the account must be set the agriculture and the 
 factories. With fine soil, and the best system of 
 irrigation in America, depending for water not on 
 wayward droppings from the clouds, as do the States 
 immediately East, but on the never - disappointing 
 snow that melts on the mountains, Utah surpasses 
 every State in the Union in the uniform generosity 
 of her valleys. She can produce four crops of 
 lucerne in a year, and, with three crops, seven tons of 
 hay to an acre. Six hundred bushels of potatoes to 
 the acre is no unheard-of yield, and almost every 
 European vegetable and fruit grows almost of itself. 
 Sheep and cattle thrive and multiply prodigiously. 
 Besides this, Brigham Young took care to equip his 
 city witli manufactories. There were wool-mills here 
 when nothing of the kind had been heard of elsewhere 
 from the Mississippi to the Pacific. There is a silk- 
 mill, a shoe-factory, a sugar-mill. It was the policy of 
 
THE WEALTH OF UTAH. 221 
 
 Young to make Utah self-sufficing for all her needs. 
 He had to, for she was insulated from the world. And 
 to avoid Gentile contamination Young tried to inten 
 sify this insulation with one hand and neutralised its 
 inconveniences with the other. 
 
 The ring-fence broke down, as others have done and 
 will do before the demoniac energy with which the 
 Anglo-Saxon fights his way to where there is gold. 
 The Mormon question scared capital away, and there 
 fore the Mormon question had to be solved. But, 
 thanks in part to Mormon ism, in part to the Anglo- 
 Saxon, Utah is now probably the most prosperous and 
 promising of all Western States. " I say to you, sir," 
 said a prominent man of business, " that this is the 
 richest mineral area in America. If silver goes down, 
 we have the gold ; if the mines peter out, we have the 
 crops ; if the crops fail, we have the stock. It looks, 
 sir, as if the Almighty had selected this land for 
 special blessings such as have been given to no other." 
 And certainly the prospective metallic wealth of Utah 
 is amazing. As yet it is hardly scratched here, as 
 elsewhere in America : that is proved by the continual 
 revival of camps like Leadville or Mercur that had 
 been once or twice deserted and allowed to fall to 
 pieces. Now in Utah is found every known metal in 
 the world except two. There is salt enough in the 
 Great Lake, to say nothing of the rock veins of pure 
 salt, as clear as ice, to pay off every national debt in 
 the world. There are two kinds of mineral rubber 
 
222 AMONG THE MORMONS. 
 
 gilsonite and elaterite which are found nowhere else, 
 except in little bits in Galicia. There is ozocerite, or 
 mineral wax, which is the best electrical insulator 
 known. There are saltpetre, alum, zinc, quicksilver, 
 mica, jasper, asbestos, coal, marble, iron, lead, copper, 
 silver, gold. Silver has been found in sandstone, 
 where it was geologically impossible that it should 
 ever get, and even in the trunks of a petrified forest. 
 More to the point, there are silver-mines in Utah that 
 have more than paid in dividends for all the stock 
 held in them. The Centennial Eureka has paid 
 360,000 on a capital of 300,000 ; the Bullion Beck, 
 421,000 on 200,000. Half-a-dozen others have done 
 almost as much. The Ontario is the richest silver- 
 mine in the world except the Broken Hill. It has 
 paid over 200,000 more in dividends than any mine 
 in America ; it has a pump that cost 100,000, forty- 
 five miles of works, and a drainage tunnel three miles 
 long. Even to-day, with silver down to sixty-five 
 cents an ounce, these mines, being well equipped with 
 plant, go on steadily producing and steadily paying 
 dividends. 
 
 Why had I never heard of this before ? The reason 
 given was that the Utah people kept as mum about 
 their riches as a boy with an apple. The sons of the 
 men of California and of the Comstock, they had 
 mining in the blood ; they went in scientifically and 
 professionally just mined and paid dividends, and 
 made no noise about it. The men of Colorado were 
 
THE AMERICAN RAND. 223 
 
 all amateurs clerks and book-keepers, lawyers and 
 doctors and when they made a find, says Utah, they 
 cackled over it like a hen with her first egg. 
 
 But besides all this, Utah has a Band of her own. 
 This is in the Mercur district, once the seat of famous 
 silver-mines and workings for cinnabar, now defunct. 
 How the gold got to be there as a chloride nobody 
 knows. It may have descended to the bed of an in 
 land sea, or have been shot up by geysers from the 
 centre of the earth. But there it is about 3, 10s. 
 to the ton, as at Johannesburg, and treated, as there, 
 by the cyanide process, which saves some 85 per cent 
 of the gold. Thanks to this process, ore can be mined, 
 transported, and milled at about 14s. a ton. Some 
 ores in the Golden Gate Mine yield 400 per ton. 
 There is said to be, an area of thirty miles where a 
 profit of over 2 per ton is as safe as the Bank of 
 England. And how much there is of this American 
 Hand, Heaven only knows. It is in its puling infancy, 
 and no man has seen beyond the very beginning of 
 it. If I were a capitalist I am not sure but I would 
 put a bit on Utah. 
 
224 
 
 XXV. 
 
 THE PACIFIC SLOPE. 
 
 SAN FRANCISCO, October 17. 
 
 AN hour or so out of Leadville and you are straddling 
 the roof of North America. Long sweeping ascents 
 hoist you to the summit of a pass 11,500 feet above 
 the sea; then through a tunnel you plunge down 
 the first reaches of the Pacific slope. Clinging to 
 the skirts of the mountains, swooping round impos 
 sible curves, taking headers down impossible gradients, 
 the train hurls you in a matter of a few hours out 
 of the Arctic into lost midsummer again. At six 
 in the morning Leadville was shivering under the 
 pale dawn; at noon the sun was roasting a tropical 
 desert. The highest railway pass of the Kockies had 
 been surprisingly un-Alpine, and it must be owned 
 that the American advertiser has over-estimated its 
 sublimity. It recalled Scotland far more nearly than 
 Zermatt. You were continually passing glades of 
 yellow grass and dry stunted bushes that at a dis- 
 
THE RIO GRANDE. 225 
 
 iance might pass for heather - glades studded with 
 little lochs and traversed by chattering little burns. 
 The splashes of snow on the mountain faces were 
 but infrequent, and never once did the train top 
 the belt of firs. Nearly all of these trees had been 
 fired in the early days of the railroad. Charred 
 stumps and beams strewed the slopes, and the stand 
 ing trunks were mostly black and bare of every twig. 
 It was literally a forest of masts. By mid-day we 
 had dropped clear out of the highland, and passed 
 into an altogether new land a land of oriental glare 
 and colour. It began with a canon of red rock, piling 
 itself up on both sides till we and our guiding torrent 
 seemed like to sink so deep into the bowels of the 
 earth that we should never find our way up to the 
 light again. Between these walls of crimson sand 
 stone we presently ran into the broadening valley 
 of the Eio Grande. These walls of rock were no 
 metaphor, but the strictest reality sheer down from 
 summit to base, with acres of face that might have 
 been squared with a plummet. In reality they had 
 been cut clean out by the river. The valley was 
 covered with quilted sand, showing where the streams 
 had crossed and united and parted in the wet season. 
 Overhead, along the crest of the red precipices, a 
 frieze of fir-trees hinted at a world on a higher 
 plane, at which we were only allowed to guess. 
 
 The sun grew fiercer, the plain wider and more arid. 
 The air was very clear and very dry, and the out- 
 
226 THE PACIFIC SLOPE. 
 
 lines of the diverging mountains hardened. We 
 were in a great desert of sand and stones and whirl 
 ing dust. It was cruel on the aching eyes, for green 
 is the only colour that refreshes, and there was no 
 green here. For growth there were but a few trees, 
 touched by autumn into a more dazzling yellow than 
 the buttercup s, and tufts of silver-grey sage. Yet 
 this parched waste stole upon the senses with an 
 imperious beauty that became a fascination. The 
 sky was sapphire; this again is no figure of speech, 
 for it shed out on the air an illumination more 
 lustrous than it received. Under this luminous blue 
 the mountains stood up in all fantastic shapes, painted 
 like the rainbow. Other ranges display an emulous 
 confusion, one peak struggling to overtop another. 
 These preserved their level and their combination 
 for miles together. Grey and cinnamon-brown were 
 their dominant colours ; but their huge flanks were 
 blotched and mottled with salmon and blood - red, 
 puce, mauve, and purple. On one side they would 
 line themselves out in barbaric palaces, towers and 
 parapets, giant castle gates, and long stretches of 
 sheer battlement, domes, minarets, and pagodas all 
 marbled and barred and blazoned with every hue 
 that is rich and delicate in the world. On the other 
 hand would be flat shapeless mounds of dead tone 
 less grey God s dump-heaps, whereupon was cast 
 all the rubble left over in the making of the world. 
 And over all, at sundown, there floated in the Western 
 
IN NEVADA. 227 
 
 sky magic islands and lagoons of shining scarlet, living 
 violet, molten gold. 
 
 To leave hyperbole, this desert of Western Colorado 
 and Utah was the one thing that nobody seems to 
 have thought it worth while to advertise, and the 
 one thing that no words can overpraise or equal. 
 Next day we were in Nevada. To go into detail 
 about the scenery of Nevada, even if there were any 
 detail to go into, would be kicking Nevada when she 
 is down. There was a day the day of the now for 
 gotten Corns tock lode, which built half San Francisco 
 when Nevada was the most brilliant star on the 
 flag. You had only to step into Nevada to make a 
 fortune ; anything in the world you might take there 
 and sell for your own price. But that day is done. 
 The Comstock is worked out. Most of the silver 
 mines are shut down, and the camps are silted up 
 in sand. Nevada is the only State whose population 
 decreased between the censuses of 1880 and 1890 ; 
 it sank from 62,000 to a beggarly 45,000 a figure 
 exceeded even then by the infant territory of Okla 
 homa. Yet Nevada is without doubt honeycombed 
 with precious metals, and if it will only rain a little 
 oftener, and if silver will only go up to ninety cents 
 an ounce, Nevada may be a great State again. Mean 
 while the passing impression of it is summed up in 
 one word dust. Alkaline dust that came eddying 
 in through every crack in the Pullman till blue coats 
 went yellow, and the floor was crisp with it dust 
 
228 THE PACIFIC SLOPE. 
 
 that caked the throat, and clogged the nostrils, and 
 stung the eyes. The sun went down this day in a 
 thick blinding mist a mist of dust. 
 
 The third morning we awoke in California. Here 
 was another turn of the kaleidoscope, displaying huge 
 well-tilled fields, fenced with substantial posts and 
 rails, heavy stacks of hay and straw, and well-nourished 
 stock. It was dry, for the rains will not corne for a 
 few weeks yet ; but it looked like business. Indeed 
 California is the most versatile State of the Union, 
 and wants only time to be among the richest. In 
 the production of wheat she stands third to Kansas 
 and Minnesota. Alone in California is found a won 
 derful harvester, which reaps, threshes, and sacks 
 grain and stacks straw all at once. In the number 
 of her sheep she comes first, exceeding even Mr 
 M Kinley s soon-to-be-protected Ohio. Of the beet- 
 sugar States she is easily first, though Louisiana 
 produces far more from the cane. Her vines and 
 her fruits are famous over all America, and now she 
 is beginning to do wonders with almonds and olives. 
 As for her gold, who has not heard of it ? She has 
 put out nearly twice as much as all the other States 
 together. When the long-promised, long-delayed high 
 prices corne in sight there should be new fortunes to 
 make in California, and new palaces to build on Nob 
 Hill in San Francisco. 
 
 The people of the Pacific slope, living in a country 
 that has very manifestly ways of its own and a will 
 
MANNERS AND CUSTOMS. 229 
 
 of its own, have adapted themselves to their environ 
 ment. What it seems good to them to do, that they 
 do. With many of them fancy goes no further than 
 the wearing of black shirts; with others it takes 
 stronger flights, and soars to clearing out banks and 
 holding up trains. The other day three enterprising 
 persons were shot down by the citizens of a small 
 town in Colorado while attempting the first exploit. 
 The day before a solitary figure, with a perforated 
 sack for a face, climbed over the tender on the Pacific 
 express mail not a dozen miles from the important 
 junction of Ogden. "Throw up your hands, gentle 
 men," said a small man with two revolvers, adding 
 with simple dignity, "I am here to rob this train." 
 And rob it he did. Uncoupling the engine and mail- 
 cars, he ran them with his own hands half a mile 
 down the line, pocketed the contents of the registered 
 letters, and has not been heard of since. All the 
 inhabitants of the Pacific slope have not the genius 
 of this admirable bandit. Yet nearly all have a 
 pretty taste in dress and manners, which are fit for 
 any court in the world by their absolute innocence 
 of any formula or constraint. If a dishevelled ruffian 
 feels sentimental in the train he takes his banjo from 
 beside his gun and strums a serenade. A stoppage 
 of the train reveals the fact that it is but " Ta-ra-ra- 
 boom-de-ay," and out of tune at that ; but the romance 
 of his liquid eyes fixed passionately upon a fly on the 
 wall remains one of the finest things on earth. All 
 
230 TTTR PACIFIC SLOPE. 
 
 the little regulations of life on the train are abrogated 
 by mutual consent West of the Rockies. If it seems 
 good to you to sit a few miles on the footboard you 
 do it. On the mail trains there is, of course, a certain 
 compulsion to get to San Francisco somewhere within 
 hail of schedule time. But on the side-lines the con 
 ductor will always stop half an hour to give you time 
 to get out and boil an egg. 
 
 San Francisco is the capital of the Pacific slope 
 the metropolis of an empire roughly a dozen times the 
 size of England. Here, so rumour says, Western free 
 dom from restraint takes a special form ; it is said to 
 be the one city of America where you can maintain a 
 semi-official wife without the least prejudice to your 
 position in society. " Many of the fair matrons of San 
 Francisco," remarks the local guide-book, genially, 
 "have memories of gallant times at the Cliff House 
 that lie buried in their hearts as their greatest secrets. 
 The history of many a midnight revel there will for 
 ever lie buried in oblivion." No doubt ; but the fleet 
 ing stranger has not time to investigate these affaire. 
 Tc him the outward aspect of San Francisco would 
 almost appear tame and suburban but for the ground 
 on which it is built. Standing on a stretch of billow 
 ing sandhills, it everywhere exposes a panorama of 
 roofs. You seem to have a more intimate knowledge 
 of it than of cities where you can only see a few walls 
 at a time. At night, too, the long dipping lines of 
 lights give an impression of distance and size, air and 
 
"A RAPID SLOPE." 231 
 
 freedom. To-night Saturday night best part of the 
 city is gathered into Market Street, the central artery. 
 The dense, business-like promenade on each pavement 
 suggests Princes Street in Edinburgh except that 
 here is electric light instead of half-darkness, as there 
 was till lately in Edinburgh and an air at once light 
 and lung-filling instead of fog. Down the street, to 
 the accompaniment of a band and a rocket or two, 
 comes a political demonstration a small thing to the 
 veteran of Chicago Day. At the corner where the 
 local candidate is to speak a scientifically built bonfire 
 is dispensing heat and blaze and liberal sparks. What 
 would the police say the Briton wonders phlegmati- 
 cally if Mr Goschen announced his campaign by a 
 bonfire in front of St George s, Hanover Square? 
 But in this land of competing sensations some such 
 little attraction is as necessary as the candidate 
 himself. 
 
 " It s a very rapid slope," remarked a gentleman at 
 Leadville of this portion of the country, and in the 
 moral sense, in which he used them, his words were 
 true. The newspapers are even more sensational than 
 in New York. The Emporium the Bon Marche* of 
 San Francisco, and one of the numerous biggest stores 
 on earth that this country boasts finds it conducive 
 to trade to woo its patrons by a band of music perched 
 on a pedestal in the midst of a restaurant, and under 
 a dazzlingly illuminated glass dome. It also has the 
 happy idea of setting up a balustrade in the midst of 
 
232 THE PACIFIC SLOPB. 
 
 one of the important departments, over which you 
 can watch golden-haired maidens receiving cash and 
 popping back change into gilt pneumatic tubes. 
 
 No doubt San Francisco must be amused. It has a 
 park, which may not be the biggest in the world, but 
 is probably the most completely equipped for pleasure 
 without overmuch profit. Within a thousand acres it 
 contains lawns and drives and beds of dahlias, chry 
 santhemums, and cannas vying with those of Chicago ; 
 a series of hothouses with tropical plants in earth and 
 water ; a bicycle - track, a riding - track, a baseball- 
 ground, a children s playground with swings, giant- 
 strides, and donkeys ; a Japanese garden with a fur 
 nished bungalow, and miniature bridges and streams, 
 and shrubs tied down with string into the gnarled and 
 twisted forms of miniature forest trees ; a belvidere, 
 with view over the Pacific; a waterfall and three 
 artificial lakes with boats ; a museum and a valley 
 laid out with seats for concerts ; an aviary with 
 canaries and blue-grey red-billed Java sparrows and 
 illuminated humming-birds and macaws ; a deer-park, 
 with kangaroos ; a squirrel -house ; a grizzly bear 
 (presented by a local newspaper); and half-a-dozen 
 survivors of the bison. Hampstead Heath, the Zoo, 
 the British Museum, Battersea Park, and the Hall by 
 the Sea may each have something that this Park has 
 not. But what a boon for Bank Holidays to have 
 them all together in one ! 
 
 Then there is Cliff House, remembered of fair 
 
THE DIVERSIONS OF SAN FRANCISCO. 233 
 
 matrons. By it are the baths, the biggest but let 
 us avoid tautology. Besides many huge basins of 
 water of all depths and all temperatures, besides 
 every acrobatic device for not getting straight into 
 the water, besides rows and rows of dressing-rooms 
 like the corridors of a first-rate hotel, the biggest 
 basin has a bandstand in the middle, and a huge 
 theatre round it, where San Francisco can hear con 
 certs and see swimming shows. Likewise, there is a 
 museum of weird sea-beasts and Japanese tableaux, 
 and a panorama of the world. When you are tired of 
 that there are gardens with white plaster statuary, 
 and a monkey-house and a terrace overlooking the 
 sea. Hence you can watch the dirty-yellow sea-lions 
 sprawling on the rocks below, and listen to them 
 barking like retrievers. On the right a streak of 
 cloud hangs half-way up the cliffs that form the 
 northern pillar of the Golden Gate. In front the 
 Farallones Islands, twenty-eight miles out the last 
 speck of West before West becomes East make little 
 dints in the orange flames of the sunset. The black 
 ening rollers of the Pacific thud beneath your feet. 
 Turning round, you face the hotel busy, hospitable, 
 discreet where they are serving dinners for two in 
 private rooms. A rapid slope ? At any rate, the San 
 Franciscans enjoy themselves. 
 
234 
 
 XXVI. 
 
 THE ISSUE. 
 
 SAN FRANCISCO, October 18. 
 
 I HEARD a short while ago an explanation of the 
 Silver movement, and its culmination at the Chicago 
 Convention, which was so elaborately picturesque 
 that it is perhaps worth while setting down here. 
 According to this theory, the Chicago platform was 
 only the last move of a game which has been playing 
 ever since the Sherman Act, if not for many years 
 longer. It is an enormous political-commercial job 
 on the part of silver -owners and their friends to 
 secure for themselves the control of the whole govern 
 ment of the United States, and untold booty besides. 
 
 One of the operations of this ring was the tremen 
 dous bulling of silver immediately after the Sherman 
 Act had authorised huge purchases of that metal by 
 the United States Government. In league, it is said, 
 with the Eothschilds and other great capitalists, the 
 silver men forced up the price of their metal almost 
 to par with gold; they would have got it actually 
 
SILVER IN THE SENATE. 235 
 
 to par, or even to a premium, and reaped enormous 
 profits, had not the Baring failure come upon them to 
 throw their combination out of joint. 
 
 But the most interesting side of the great game has 
 been the political. The silver barons aimed at raising 
 themselves into a power like the Chartered Company, 
 as seen by its enemies a power which should use the 
 leverage of politics for huge private gains, and the 
 attainment of unlimited personal ambition. It began 
 in the Senate. Under the United States constitution 
 the Senate is not based upon proportional representa 
 tion, as are the House of Representatives and the 
 Electoral College for the choice of President. Every 
 State, great or small, sends two Senators to Washing 
 ton. It is evident that this provision of the consti 
 tution offers a prodigious opportunity to an interest 
 having the local distribution of the silver -mining 
 industry. Colorado, Nevada, Idaho, and Montana 
 contain between them, on the last census, less than 
 seven hundred thousand inhabitants. The State of 
 New York has well over five millions, but the four 
 States have eight Senators to New York s two. 
 
 Now, these four States being virtually nothing but 
 silver-mining camps, it was easy for the silver ring to 
 establish a party in the Senate representing the ring, 
 and nothing but the ring, just as Mr Rochfort Maguire 
 was said to represent, not County Clare, but Mr Cecil 
 Rhodes. Hence arose a group of such men as Senators 
 Teller, Dubois, Stewart, and Jones of Nevada some 
 
236 THE ISSUE. 
 
 of them mine-owners, some of them attorneys engaged 
 for the political representation of the silver interest, 
 but all of them men of great ability and adroitness. 
 Nominally Eepublicans, really buccaneers, they begin 
 by putting pressure on the party of their putative 
 affiliation. They bartered their support of Protec 
 tion against a toleration on the part of the official 
 Republicans of bimetallism. It became a sort of 
 working principle of the Eepublican party that no 
 official pronouncement must be made derogatory to 
 the claims of silver. The party expressed itself again 
 and again in favour of bimetallism. Mr M Kinley 
 expressed himself personally again and again to the 
 same effect; he would have been perfectly ready to 
 fight this campaign on the free silver basis if the 
 Convention of St Louis had told him to. 
 
 Meanwhile and herein lies the beauty of the 
 combination the silver group had been at work 
 with the Democratic party also. The rural districts 
 were manured with tons of Coin s Financial School. 
 The Silver party got to work in the local units of 
 organisation the primaries in the precincts, the com 
 mittees in the counties. They worked so secretly 
 and to such purpose that the Democratic party was 
 leavened with the theory of free coinage, and the 
 organisation captured before Gold Standard Demo 
 crats, like President Cleveland and Senator Hill, 
 realised what was upon them. Then came the 
 Chicago Convention. To the Convention came all 
 
THE TWO CONVENTIONS. 237 
 
 the delegates from the already electroplated local 
 organisations, ready to vote for silver. More than 
 this, the ring remember, I am only repeating, though 
 repeating what I was told by a man of great know 
 ledge and a foremost economical authority had pre 
 pared them a man against the Presidential nomination, 
 as Samuel had prepared Saul in the Bible. That Mr 
 Bryan s great speech about the Crown of Thorns and 
 the Cross of Gold had been written out and rehearsed 
 beforehand nobody familiar with the unspontaneous 
 methods of American political oratory can doubt for 
 a moment. But on this theory the delegates were 
 also prepared. The storming of the Convention by 
 that speech, and the nomination of Mr Bryan, were 
 nothing more nor less than a put-up scheme, carefully 
 worked out for weeks before. With the official 
 Democracy definitely pledged to independent free 
 coinage of silver, and the official Eepublicanism afraid 
 to pledge itself definitely against it, the silver buc 
 caneers stood indeed on velvet. 
 
 But then came the St Louis Convention, and put 
 the whole game to the touch. Even the St Louis 
 Convention dared not put itself on record as opposing 
 bimetallism outright. But it declared for waiting 
 upon the consent of other nations. By the strenuous 
 efforts of Mr Kohlsaat, a Chicago capitalist, the Con 
 vention was induced to take a firm line for the gold 
 standard, on present conditions. Even that was touch 
 and go, for the party wished to hedge to the last, and 
 
238 THE ISSUE. 
 
 to leave the decisive word " gold " out of its declara 
 tion of faith. But Mr Kohlsaat insisted, and the 
 battle of gold was won. Then followed what was 
 described to me as a great uprising of the national 
 financial conscience not unmixed, I would add, with 
 the personal financial conscience. Anyhow, the feel 
 ing for gold surged up, and the Tellers and Stewarts 
 saw themselves obliged to quit their double - faced 
 machinations and go into a straight fight. For them 
 and their clients the stake is variously put at from 
 seven to twelve millions sterling a -year. That is 
 what they stand to win if free silver becomes law 
 and sends the bullion up to par. To this trifle they 
 add the political dominion of seventy millions of 
 people. It is a big stake perhaps the biggest played 
 for since Napoleon, anyhow the biggest since Dr 
 Jameson. But by the best accounts that stake is 
 not going to be landed. 
 
 All this may be an imaginative libel ; it is strenu 
 ously denied that there is any silver trust at all : but 
 it is a good story, so let it go. At any rate, it is 
 illustrative of the questions on which this election is 
 hinging. People state and deplore the fact that for 
 the first time in the history of the States the poor are 
 now banded against the rich. Others point out that 
 you can draw an almost exact frontier along the 
 Potomac, Ohio, and Mississippi, that cuts off the 
 Bryan country and the M Kinley country. For the 
 second time in the history of the States one territorial 
 
BREAD-AND-BUTTER POLITICS. 239 
 
 area is brigaded against another. But I believe that 
 both these facts, striking enough superficially, are only 
 accidental. The real fight is not poor against rich or 
 South and West against North and East, but one com 
 mercial interest against another, a fight of pocket 
 against pocket. In the North they make their money 
 by financial operations, banking, brokering, and the 
 like, and by manufactures. Free silver would dis 
 locate the first of these operations, and Protection 
 would put a premium on the second. In the South 
 and the Mississippi valley they make their money, 
 when they make it at all, by crops. Free silver 
 would mean higher prices for their produce, and 
 perhaps a relief from their debts due to the North, 
 while Protection would, to a certain extent, put them 
 in the hands of the manufacturing trusts. In the 
 Kockies they mine. Free silver would raise the value 
 of their depreciated product, and give employment to 
 perhaps a quarter of a million of idle men. On the 
 Pacific Coast they mine gold and farm. Free silver 
 would hurt the one industry and help the other. 
 Therefore the Pacific Coast stands in a somewhat 
 vague and doubtful position. It is bread-and-butter 
 politics, all through, from Cape Cod to the Golden 
 Gate. 
 
 Perhaps an exception to this generalisation ought 
 to be made as regards the South; there bitterness 
 against the North is probably at least as potent as 
 the economic factor. But for other parts of the 
 
240 THE ISSUE. 
 
 country one or two examples seem to go in support 
 of my theory of this election. One of the few States 
 west of the Missouri where Mr M Kinley i conceded 
 to have a chance is Wyoming. Wyoming is a rather 
 absurd little State, given over to female suffrage and 
 generous divorce laws ; it has the smallest population 
 in the Union except Nevada, and nobody pretends to 
 take Wyoming seriously. But Wyoming gets its living, 
 not like Montana in the North by silver mining, or 
 Nebraska in the East by farming, but by the produc 
 tion of coal. The mines are largely owned and man 
 aged by Eastern capitalists. Now, if Mr M Kinley is 
 elected, one of the anticipated blessings of his reign is 
 a protective tariff on coal. Wyoming reckons to be 
 then able to sell coal in San Francisco cheaper than it 
 can be sold from Vancouver Island, and Wyoming 
 reckons to put much money in its purse. Therefore, 
 there is thought to be a possibility so I am assured 
 by seemingly good authority: I have not set foot inside 
 the State that Wyoming, in the very heart of the 
 Bryan district, will cast her three votes for M Kinley. 
 Utah affords another instance. Nobody supposes that 
 Utah is going for M Kinley ; silver is too strong for 
 that. But apart from the silver industry, Utah grows 
 sheep and cattle. Therefore a Protective duty on 
 wool and on Mexican imported cattle would put 
 money in Utah s purse also; whence shrewd judges 
 predict a strong minority in Utah also for M Kinley. 
 These two cases illustrate and explain the very 
 
IN A NUTSHELL. 241 
 
 practical interest which every single citizen takes 
 in this election. No doubt the theoretical question 
 has its charm. Where the heart is there will the 
 conversation be ; probably no democracy has ever 
 tasted the privileges of popular government with 
 such gluttonous enjoyment as the United States have 
 enjoyed these six months talk of dollars. But the 
 matter goes deeper than the mere pleasure of academic 
 debate. This is perhaps the only contested election 
 of the world s history in which every elector has a 
 direct money interest in the result. The only diffi 
 culty is to determine exactly where that interest 
 lies. The arguments of either party are directed less 
 to maintaining the broad balance of national expedi 
 ency than to showing the individual voter that it was 
 money in his individual pocket to vote for this man 
 or the other. It must not be inferred from this that 
 arguments which take higher ground appeals to na 
 tional integrity and patriotism are consciously, or 
 even unconsciously, insincere. Without doubt, many 
 men support the gold standard because they believe 
 that to abandon it would be to dishonour the bill of 
 their country. Many support silver because they 
 believe that it will lead back to national prosperity. 
 But, to put it summarily, the East has money, and 
 therefore wants to keep up the price of it ; the West 
 and South have none, and therefore want to keep the 
 price down. That is the issue in a nutshell. 
 
242 
 
 XXVIL 
 
 THE HEATHEN CHINEE. 
 
 SAN FRANCISCO, October 19. 
 
 THE Heathen Chinee is peculiar to San Francisco and 
 the Pacific coast. Not but what as an individual he 
 is fairly common in New York; nowhere, indeed, in 
 the United States would anybody ever turn to look 
 back at a Chinaman. But it is only in San Francisco, 
 which stands opposite to his own country, that he has 
 attained the proportions of a racial problem. It is no 
 inapt illustration, by the way, of the vastness of this 
 country that it maintains a full-grown racial problem 
 at each end, each one knowing little and caring 
 nothing of the other. In the South Atlantic States 
 the sparse Chinee is ignored, but the nigger is a bug 
 bear. In the Pacific States the nigger is a fellow- 
 citizen, while the Chinee is a reptile. 
 
 The method by which the Chinee annexed one of the 
 oldest and most fashionable quarters of San Francisco 
 for his own exclusive use has all the simplicity of true 
 genius. He did it by sheer filth. A Chinee took a 
 
THE CONQUEST OF CHINATOWN. 243 
 
 room in a house, and imported other Chinese to share 
 it for a consideration. Comparatively cleanly in 
 their own persons though only very comparatively 
 they never cleaned their clothes or their bedding, 
 or their rooms or their kitchens, or anything that was 
 theirs. Presently the stench became such that no 
 white man would live in the house ; the whites went 
 out and the yellows came in. Then the two houses on 
 either side became untenantable ; they also became 
 filled with Chinese. Then came the turn of the next 
 two, and so on all down the street. But what was the 
 owner of the houses doing all this while ? Had he 
 nothing to say to this process of driving out his white 
 tenants ? Not he. For houses peopled with Chinese 
 are the most profitable form of property in San Fran 
 cisco. They live thirty, or forty, or fifty in a twelve- 
 roomed house, and rent rolls in to a brisk tune. And 
 if they cause dilapidations they never ask for repairs ; 
 no building, plumbing, plastering, or painting troubles 
 the landlord of the Chinese quarter. Thus the Chinee 
 conquered and colonised a little city for himself in the 
 heart of San Francisco a city of dirt and colour, of 
 shrewdness and superstition, of industry and de 
 bauchery ; a city absolutely oriental in the middle of 
 the absolute Occident. Too far West has become East. 
 Out of the blaze of electric light and the whirr of 
 electric tram-cars you make one turn into darkness 
 and silence. You are in the middle of China. The 
 houses were built by westerners for westerners ; but 
 
244 THE HEATHEN CHINEE. 
 
 it is wonderful how completely the orientals have 
 orientalised them. First overlaying everything with 
 a thick coat of filth, they have built out green balconies, 
 hung out green streamers with huge golden signs in 
 their own characters, and papered the walls with red 
 placards, on which they inscribe the news of the day. 
 Above a little fruit-stall you will see projecting from 
 the wall a wooden box rather bigger than a coffin. 
 It might be a receptacle for refuse, or perhaps a 
 cistern. But it is neither ; it is the house of the stall- 
 keeper. When he closes his stall at night, or in the 
 early morning, he climbs into that box by a ladder, and 
 goes to bed. When you see that, you begin to realise 
 the possibility that white neighbours would find the 
 heathen Chinee a little unsanitary. 
 
 The Chinaman has adorned his special district of 
 San Francisco with many buildings sufficiently pre 
 tentious. There are two theatres, but neither of them 
 is open just at present. This is the dead season in 
 Chinese theatrical circles ; they are exchanging the 
 companies that have served their year in San Francisco 
 for fresh ones. The idolatrous Chinee is commend- 
 ably free from mummer-worship. The actors live in 
 the theatre, and that for a very sufficient reason ; if 
 they show themselves in the street the people set 
 upon them with sticks, stones, vegetables, and any 
 other handy weapons, and half kill them. The ex 
 planation of this genial custom is that the actor, being 
 a vagabond and a Bohemian, sends no money over to 
 
A RESTAURANT. 245 
 
 his relations in China, whereas all others do. To 
 send money thus out of the country is, in American 
 eyes, the blackest of Chinese sins; to fail to do so 
 is exactly as black in the eyes of the Chinaman. 
 
 Chinatown is also adorned with palatial restaurants. 
 The Chinee can be frugal, but it is a mistake to suppose 
 that he will not fling his money about on occasion. 
 Banquets at two pounds a-head, with champagne and 
 every delicacy of the season, are far from uncommon 
 in squalid Chinatown. You enter the banqueting- 
 room up a broad staircase ; the room itself is large 
 and handsome, with stained floors, wooden carvings 
 that may be quaint but are undeniably rich and 
 elaborate, hangings of fine texture, and solid walnut- 
 wood chairs with marble seats. In a corner is the 
 safe in which the takings of the establishment are 
 treasured. It has eight locks and eight keys one for 
 each of the eight proprietors ; none can get at the safe 
 except in the presence of all the others. The banquet 
 is enriched with every meat and every drink of the 
 country, sometimes with the choicest vintages of 
 France, usually with many excellent vegetables native 
 to the soil, but eaten only by the Chinee, and always 
 with such delicacies as ducks flattened out and pressed 
 like pressed beef, with all manner of birds and beasts 
 and fish preserved and imported from China. The 
 men sit round the table and feast solemnly from ten 
 or so till four. The women sit in a ring behind them, 
 and eat only what their masters are pleased to pass 
 
246 THE HEATHEN CHINEE. 
 
 over their shoulders. A band of single-stringed fiddles, 
 gongs, and cymbals makes music hardly conducive to 
 a Western digestion. And if a reveller feels the need 
 of opium, there is a divan against the wall where he 
 can lie and smoke his pipe, and then rise and fall to 
 again. 
 
 The joss-houses make another of the architectural 
 glories of Chinatown. Here again is much stained 
 wood on floor and walls, with magnificent embroidered 
 hangings, with carved and gilded wooden screens and 
 decorations. The Chinese eye must be as alien to 
 ours as the Chinese ear, for the Western devil can 
 see little form or symmetry in the queer twists and 
 twirls of these masterpieces. If the Chinee can take 
 in all these multitudinous niggles and quiggles of gold, 
 and at one view combine them all into one effect, then 
 he must have an eye with a million facets, like a 
 beetle s. One of the carvings in the biggest joss- 
 house is a special gift from the Emperor of China, 
 who endowed the church in recognition of a subscrip 
 tion by its members to alleviate a famine at home. 
 It bears his monogram in the centre a golden cob 
 web, not unlike the fist of Abdul the Damned as 
 shown on the Turkish cigarettes. Before each shrine 
 in the joss-house stands a cup of tea, in case the joss 
 should feel thirsty ; he takes it without milk or sugar. 
 The great shrine is a kind of altar with a hideous 
 bearded image seated upon it. This represents a 
 historic Chinee who actually lived on this earth, a 
 
THE SIX COMPANIES. 247 
 
 brave, wise, and godly or should we say jossly ? man, 
 who makes intercession with the real joss. The real 
 joss dwells behind a screen, veiled from the public eye. 
 There are no services of a congregation ; the faithful 
 drop in one by one, kneel down on mats, and prefer 
 their petitions. But first of all they bang a gong to 
 make sure that the joss is awake and attending to his 
 business. 
 
 The Chinee is deceitful above all things, and 
 desperately wicked. He is law-abiding as against 
 the whites, but within Chinatown every kind of law 
 less outrage goes hardly checked. There is indeed 
 a rule within rule among the Chinese. The six 
 provinces which furnish the Chinese population of 
 San Francisco have their several presidents. The 
 six companies, they are called ; each worships in its 
 separate joss-house, and talks its separate dialect. A 
 suit between two members of the same company is 
 brought before the president of the company; a 
 dispute between two of its different companies, before 
 the six presidents in conclave. Like the Mormons, 
 the Chinese discourage the use of the civil courts. 
 These presidents have of course no legal status in the 
 United States, but they maintain their authority in a 
 manner effective and thoroughly Chinese. If a Chinee 
 in San Francisco defies their mandate, they send word 
 back to his native place; whereupon his father and 
 mother are burned. But in spite of this rule, terror 
 and anarchy are the real government of Chinatown. 
 
248 THE HEATHEN CHINEE. 
 
 Secret societies, known to the West under the generic 
 title of Highbinders, blackmail and murder at will. 
 Wealthy merchants are constrained to subscribe to 
 these organisations: if they refuse, they are found 
 dead in the street. A cobbler was evicted one day 
 from the stall he had occupied, and a big house was 
 shortly after built on its site. But not a room in that 
 house could be let. The perplexed proprietor sent 
 for a detective knowledgeable in the ways of China 
 town, and he discovered an unobtrusive placard on 
 the new house. " Whoever occupies any part of this 
 building until I am paid two thousand dollars com 
 pensation," ran its genial legend, " will be killed." 
 The cobbler was accommodated with a room in the 
 new house, the notice disappeared, and the building 
 filled up with tenants. Sometimes the different gangs 
 of Highbinders carry on private war between them 
 selves, and the streets are thick with smoke. They 
 use long pistols, and rest the barrel on the left arm tc 
 aim ; they shoot very badly, but the streets of China 
 town are so narrow that a bullet is seldom wasted 
 However, the Highbinders have attracted the very 
 urgent notice of the Government as well as that of 
 the Chinese Minister at Washington. They have 
 been swept out more than once. They grow up 
 again, but their best days are done. 
 
 Besides being bloodthirsty, the Chinee has, as every 
 body knows a genius for fraud and treachery of every 
 kind. The personal vices he possesses in their most 
 
AN OPIUM DEN. 249 
 
 luxuriant growth. He lias invented a spirit that will 
 make you drunker for ten cents than any other brew 
 on earth. He smokes opium fervently without any 
 British Government to tempt him to it. A tedious 
 vice opium-smoking appears. Imagine a dark, dank, 
 underground, foul -smelling courtyard, full of all 
 manner of garbage. Eound it rise three storeys of 
 wooden rooms with verandahs, on which the inmates 
 cook their food. Open a door, and you are in a 
 Chinese doss-house. It is something between a 
 scullery and the forecastle of an ill-found merchant 
 man. Two tiers of filthy bunks run round it, without 
 bed-clothes accommodation for about two dozen in 
 the space of a decent coal-cellar. On one of the bunks 
 lay a dirty little leather -skinned old man smoking 
 opium. He did not so much as turn his head at the 
 entrance of foreign devils ; he took no notice of any 
 thing but his opium. In his fingers he held a long 
 pipe ; before him was a lamp and a jar of opium. He 
 collected a drop of the viscous syrup on a bodkin and 
 kneaded it in the flame, turning it round and round 
 till it hardened into a little glutinous ball about the 
 size of a pea. Then he put it in his pipe, lit it at the 
 lamp, and inhaled deeply. Out came a cloud of blue, 
 fragrant smoke. Another deep inhalation, another 
 cloud of smoke and the pipe was out. It took at 
 least two minutes to prepare, and about ten seconds 
 to smoke. To produce the desired intoxication, it 
 takes a seasoned smoker twenty pipes nearly three- 
 
250 THE HEATHEN CHINEE. 
 
 quarters of an hour twiddling a needle in a lamp-jet. 
 We need not be afraid that opium-smoking will ever 
 become a Western vice. 
 
 As for the other debaucheries of the Chinee, they 
 had better be left untold. He practises all that have 
 names, and many that have not. All the women in 
 Chinatown are bought and sold as truly slaves as 
 any mulatto girl in Carolina before the war. It is 
 true that the Chinee has his virtues. He is wonder 
 fully clever in an imitative way ; he will watch a 
 white man making shoes in his booth until he is as 
 good a shoemaker himself. He is a perfect servant in 
 a land where servants are rare and expensive. He 
 wellnigh monopolises the laundry business, not only 
 in San Francisco, but in all large towns. He furnishes 
 admirable tailoring to the most fastidious dandies of 
 the Pacific Coast. He is frugal, industrious, filial. 
 But his very virtues conspire with his vices to earn 
 him the detestation of the white man. He is a good 
 workman : he undersells white labour. He is frugal, 
 and he sends his savings home to his parents : he is 
 draining money out of the country. He is a parasite, 
 a louse; shake him off. So the importation of new 
 Chinamen into the States is now rigorously forbidden. 
 Some come in by virtue of skilful and resolute perjury, 
 but not many. Chinatown must diminish, and the 
 ground won for a space by the East will pass back 
 again to the West. 
 
 In the meantime it is hard for the stranger to take 
 
A DKEAM OF ALADDIN. 251 
 
 Chinatown seriously for good or for evil. It is too 
 much like falling asleep and dreaming of Aladdin. 
 Under the soft paper lanterns there pass noiseless 
 figures in blouses and loose trousers and slippers, with 
 black red- tufted caps and pigtails down to their knees. 
 You see the big-spectacled jewellers patiently chasing 
 gold ornaments or melting them in the flames from 
 their blow-pipes. You see barbers with short square 
 razors, shaving head and eyebrows, cleaning out ears, 
 and scraping eyeballs. Up a steep flight of broken 
 stairs you see almond-eyed Jezebels simpering behind 
 lattices. Then you turn twenty yards to the left, and 
 there are the electric light and the electric cars again, 
 dry-goods stores and cut-rate ticket -offices. It was 
 surely a dream of Aladdin, 
 
XXVIII. 
 
 ON THE ROAD. 
 
 MOOSE JAW, ASSINIBOIA, CANADA, October 26. 
 IF we are a nation of shopkeepers, then the United 
 States are a nation of commercial travellers. Equally 
 energetic in their different ways, the shopkeeper is 
 the more substantial and the more prudent of the 
 two, the traveller the more vivacious, restless, and 
 plausible. So it is with us and the Americans. It 
 is not only the bagman proper, though he is more 
 ubiquitous and more assertive here than anywhere 
 else, and is respected, almost worshipped, in propor 
 tion to his assertion. But every American, bagman 
 or other, must be ever on the move. 
 
 It is necessary for his business : with an enter 
 prising caution that Britons might well emulate, he 
 never invests his money in any property, be it a 
 thousand miles away, without first going to take a 
 look at it. But travel is also necessary for his 
 pleasure, even for his existence. To him a week s 
 
THE ROVING AMERICAN. 253 
 
 journey is far less hardship than a week s stay in the 
 same place. I believe many Americans regard that 
 day as wasted in which they do not see the inside of 
 a railway train. This roving temperament is, after 
 all, perfectly natural. The native American has it 
 in his blood. He descends from generations of col 
 onists, and the colonist is essentially the man who 
 thinks there is something a little further on a little 
 better than what he has, and who goes after it. This 
 sort of rainbow-chaser seldom makes money, but he 
 makes empires. Even the emigrant into America 
 acquires the vagrant disposition. I met an old friend 
 in San Francisco, a man who came out here at fifty 
 or so. He has not prospered as why should he ? 
 But he would be very loath to go back. " I should 
 miss the journeys," he said " going up to Victoria, 
 or down to Los Angeles." Now, in England, that 
 man never even wanted to go away in the summer 
 from the suburb of London in which he lived. But 
 when once a man has got as far as America, he 
 acquires the contempt of distance ; having come so 
 far, he might as well go a bit further. Americans 
 often seem to travel for the mere satisfaction of going 
 through a new country, and staying the night in a 
 new hotel. They add them to their collection, so to 
 say, as an entomologist adds a beetle. And that 
 though Western towns are all exactly alike, and 
 instead of being named, might just as well be num 
 bered like their streets. Whether because of busi- 
 
254 ON THE ROAD. 
 
 ness, then, or pleasure, or habit, America has to be 
 well equipped for travel. And America is. 
 
 The American constitution has been called a system 
 of checks. So is American life. When you want to 
 travel you give your baggage to the porter of your 
 hotel, and he gives you a check in return. At the 
 station you reclaim it with the check, and pass it in 
 at a counter and receive another check. As you 
 approach your destination a functionary conies along 
 the train, takes your check, and gives you another 
 check in its place. He fishes out your baggage and 
 conveys it to your hotel for a consideration. You 
 have left your third and last check at the office of the 
 hotel when you enter it, and thence it is delivered up 
 on receipt of the baggage. At first you bless this 
 arrangement as the salvation of the traveller. But 
 after a few weeks of it the tyranny of the check be 
 comes so galling that you begin to long for the fine 
 old English method of dumping down your goods in 
 front of a porter and leaving them to find the way for 
 themselves. You would even hail it as a personal 
 triumph if some of your baggage would get lost. But 
 it never does. Sometimes it arrives late, but it always 
 arrives. Yet it seldom arrives in the shape in which 
 it started, if that is any consolation. They who have 
 to do with baggage see to that. You very soon dis 
 cover why Americans carry their goods in ironclad 
 trunks, and why it is madness for anybody to do any 
 thing else. I started out, like an idiot, with a new 
 
THE CHECK SYSTEM. 255 
 
 leather portmanteau. They ripped the stout brass 
 lock off in the first week not for plunder apparently, 
 but simply because it is the tradition of the service. 
 They punched it and kicked it and danced on it. In 
 softer hours, when literary inspiration came, they 
 wrote on it. My portmanteau to-day is an epitome 
 of the political sentiment of the United States from 
 New York to San Francisco. As a historical docu 
 ment it is beyond price, and I am contemplating 
 the gift of it to the library of Congress at Wash 
 ington. As a portmanteau it has both feet in the 
 grave. 
 
 The system of checks is not confined to travellers 
 luggage. The conductor of the train passes ceaselessly 
 to and fro asking for your ticket and giving you i* 
 check in return, or asking for your check and return 
 ing your ticket. If you hand your stick to a boy in a 
 hotel while you write your name in the register, he 
 dashes off to stow it away in some secret place, and 
 returns triumphant with a check. In the very hotel 
 bar, when you buy sevenpence ha porth of whisky you 
 get a check and walk two yards across the bar to pay 
 at a desk. But the apotheosis of the check is at 
 Niagara. When you go down to the Cave of the 
 Winds you strip off all your clothes and leave them, 
 as well as your valuables, in a tin box with the 
 attendant. Then you go down to battle with the 
 cataract attired only in a suit of pyjamas, a suit of 
 oilskins, and a check lashed round your neck, rising 
 
256 ON THE ROAD. 
 
 and falling with the beating of your heart. Nc 
 wonder the American speaks of death as handing in 
 his checks. It is only by death that he can rid him 
 self of them. 
 
 But in all such mechanical devices as these for 
 saving labour or promoting convenience the Ameri- 
 oans, after all, are easy masters of the world. The 
 only fault to be found with them is that they push 
 ingenuity so far that it sometimes becomes almost in 
 convenient. For billiard-markers, to take an instance, 
 they use strings of numbered checks hung across the 
 room. Now it is no easier to mark on a string of 
 checks than on the ordinary sort of marker we use at 
 home ; but it is novel and it is ingenious, and that is 
 enough to commend it in America. You might say 
 the same of the device which puts the gum of an 
 envelope on the body of it and leaves the flap clean, 
 until it occurs to you that thereby you can seal the 
 envelope without licking the gum. Then, if you object 
 to a little harmless necessary gurn on your tongue, you 
 cry out in admiration of the ridiculously simple stroke 
 of genius which gets rid of it ; if you do not, you may 
 think the invention hardly worth inventing. This is 
 a very fair example of the beauty and simplicity of 
 many American arrangements. Perhaps you could do 
 without it, yet you cannot but admire it. 
 
 But the field where American ingenuity runs riot 
 is the railway carriage. In this, as in a warship, 
 space is necessarily limited, and this necessity is the 
 
THE SLEEPING-CAR 257 
 
 fertile mother of inventions innumerable. Space is 
 not, of course, so rigidly limited as in one of our 
 own short four -sectioned coaches. The American 
 long-distance car, to carry forty- eight people, is three 
 or four times the length of ours, much higher, and 
 enormously heavier. As neither tracks nor signals 
 are all they might be on most American railroads, 
 the cars are built to stand a tremendous strain with 
 out breaking up. The skeleton is of iron or steel 
 girders, again as if it were a battleship; with this 
 framework and their general weight they would cut 
 through an English railway carriage as the Majestic 
 would cut through a penny steamboat. I was privi 
 leged yesterday to see one of these cars tip over. 
 The West-bound train to Vancouver was leaving a 
 station where it had stopped alongside of us, and in 
 getting back on to the main track it ran off the 
 metals. Dragged against a rail, it snapped it as you 
 might snap a clay pipe- stem, and then ran over the 
 edge of the low embankment. It swayed heavily, 
 poised itself, seemed to hang in the air, half over, 
 for a minute, two minutes was it going to stay 
 there for ever? then crash it went over on to its 
 side. There was a shed by the track which broke 
 the fall and itself, too, as if it had been an empty 
 matchbox. Yet so far as I could see the car was 
 absolutely unharmed. Willing hands immediately 
 smashed half-a-dozen double -windows to get out 
 the five people who were rolling about inside. But 
 
258 ON THE ROAD. 
 
 I believe those windows made up the grand total of 
 all the damage done. 
 
 Inside, the sleeping-car is a miracle of luxury. All 
 the wood is mahogany or looks like it and all the 
 cushions are velvet. It looks as rich and solid as a 
 British dining-room of the old school. Yet every 
 single thing you see is hollow ; everything is a cup 
 board or a bed-fitting, or some convenience of the 
 sort. The panels in the sloping wall above your 
 head let down to form the upper berths. Between 
 them and the wall of the car is stored the bedding. 
 The seats which run across the car, facing each 
 other in pairs, with an aisle down the middle draw 
 out to make the lower berths. You get sheets, two 
 pillows, and as many rugs as you like. The bed is 
 not unreasonably short, and there is no necessity to 
 tie yourself up in knots, unless you are well ovei 
 six feet. As for breadth, the bed is as wide as a 
 seat built for two persons, and I believe two persons 
 sometimes occupy a berth. The objection to this is 
 the rooted American hatred of fresh air, and the 
 tendency to be ill if a room or car goes below 75. 
 You are even forbidden to have the window giving 
 on to your berth open at night a prohibition, like 
 all others in the United States, habitually defied. As 
 for your clothes, it looks impossible in the daytime 
 that space could be found to dispose of them. But 
 at night, when you climb into your upper berth or 
 dive into your lower, you find that pegs and racks 
 
THE DINING-CAR. 259 
 
 and hammocks have grown up round you on every 
 side. After two days practice you know exactly 
 where to stow each garment. There is room under 
 the lower berth for your boots and your bag, and the 
 black porter has cleaned your boots in the morning. 
 It should be added that your modesty is protected by 
 a curtain which you can button as closely as you will. 
 At night the car looks like a narrow tapestried pas 
 sage, with nothing but peeping boot-toes and rustling 
 snores to mark it for a fully-peopled dormitory. 
 
 This is not all the sleeping-car. There is a draw 
 ing-room simply a cushioned coupt, in which four 
 people can live and sleep and a smoking-room, with 
 arrangements for washing and the like. There are 
 hot steam-pipes under the seats which maintain an 
 equable warmth, and you wonder what sort of a bar 
 barian you are to come from a country where they 
 have got no further than tin water-cans. Between 
 the seats are sockets on which tables can be set up, 
 and the tables have clips to hold a tablecloth. In what 
 are called buffet-cars, you eat food cooked by a nigger 
 who travels with the train. Such food is simple and 
 almost uniformly bad. As it is cooked in a space of 
 some five feet by eighteen inches, this is hardly won 
 derful. To other trains a dining-car is attached. 
 With tables and comfortable seats ranged down it, 
 this is a very different affair; you are well served, 
 well fed, and not heavily charged. Where no dining- 
 car is attached, the train stops twenty minutes to 
 
260 ON THE ROAD. 
 
 half an hour at a wayside station for meals. They 
 are sometimes wonderfully good and sometimes won 
 derfully bad, and when you only halt twenty minutes 
 I am not sure but I prefer the bad. To have to eat 
 through excellent trout, sausages, bacon, buttered 
 eggs, fried potatoes, and beef-steak all piled up 
 round a single plate is almost too much for twenty 
 minutes, and only encourages unmanly regret for the 
 unattainable. Another luxury in the way of railway 
 accommodation is a drawing-room car with easy- 
 chairs, but these we have at home even more sump 
 tuous. Lastly, there is the observation-car an open 
 shed on wheels, designed to give you a view of the 
 scenery. 
 
 By far the most magnificent sleeping-car I have 
 met is that of the Canadian Pacific, wherein I am 
 trying to write this. It is wider and loftier than 
 any other, more richly and elegantly upholstered. 
 You can tell at once that it hails elsewhere than 
 from the United States by the inscription under the 
 looking-glasses. " Tuum est," it says, and you may bet 
 your life no Yankee ever had any use for a Latin 
 inscription inside a railway carriage. In this car the 
 two middle sections of the six have their seats along 
 the wall of the car instead of across it : this gives a 
 broader floor in the middle. Above these lateral 
 seats are sheets of window nearly twice the usual 
 size. The smoking-room, again, is an especial joy. 
 It occupies the whole width of the car at its hinder 
 
THE C.P.R. 261 
 
 end, instead of being cranked in by a corridor leading 
 past it, as in most of the cars of the United States. 
 With the same large windows on either side, and other 
 windows and a door forming the back end of the car, 
 it affords a splendid prospect on three sides of the 
 train. The food on these C.P.R. trains is above the 
 average, and the price is consistently insignificant. 
 There is even joy of joys ! a bath-room. True, you 
 may not have a bath in it, for the bath season closes 
 on the first of October, but at least the bath-room 
 affords a sanctuary for the naked, and he is a poor 
 traveller who has not mastered the theory and prac 
 tice of taking a perpendicular bath. The sleeping and 
 dining cars in the United States belong to the Pull 
 man Company, and are run by them : you take your 
 berth at a different booking-office from that where 
 you get your railway ticket. The Canadian Pacific 
 owns and runs its own, and for comfort and good 
 service I doubt if they have their equal in the world. 
 Everything is done that admirable organisation, care, 
 and courtesy can do to mitigate the horrors of the 
 week s journey across the continent. The only doubt is 
 whether the Company does not begin at the wrong end. 
 Why not shorten the journey ? It is said that when 
 Sir William Van Home travels on the line his special 
 runs fifty and sixty miles an hour. We poor devils 
 have never once seen forty. It would be the easiest 
 thing in the world to shorten the journey by at least 
 a day, and until this is done the C.P.R. will never 
 
262 ON THE ROAD. 
 
 really compete with the Trans-continental lines far 
 ther South. 
 
 One feature of American train life for train life 
 is what it comes to when you have passed your 
 second night on board is the deportment of the 
 officials. The conductor and his subordinates, the 
 porter and the brakeman, the boy who sells news 
 papers and cigars and chewing-gum they may all 
 be found sitting on the passengers* seats, dining at 
 the passengers table, washing in the passengers 
 basins, and conversing cheerfully the while with the 
 passengers selves. It is thought by some that they 
 do this to show that they are as good as you. If so, 
 they do it so much that they must think the fact 
 needs a good deal of ilemonstration. Most English 
 people, and many Americans, object to this habit, and 
 especially complain at having to drink out of a glass 
 wherefrom a nigger has just rinsed his gums. I grant 
 that this is an extreme case, but then happily there 
 are always two glasses. And, personally, I don t mind 
 the rest of it. I have as firm a belief in the natural 
 inequality of man as anybody in the world. I believe 
 that I am superior in intelligence, education, and 
 manners, though possibly inferior in virtue and 
 material wealth, to any railway guard in America. 
 But is that any reason why I should not speak to 
 him ? If we spoke only to those whom we deem our 
 equals, the art of language would be lost in a fort 
 night. And if I speak to him, why should he not sit 
 
DEMOCRACY ON THE TRAIN. 263 
 
 down by me ? I have had most instructive conver 
 sations upon the public attitude towards Anarchism 
 with a conductor whose father was a university 
 graduate, and on the currency question and political 
 economy generally with a black porter. As for wash 
 ing, why not ? They don t dirty the soap ; they have, 
 in fact, exactly the same quality of dirt on their 
 hands as I have. At the passengers table they eat 
 quite correctly except, of course, the blacks ; it 
 would be going too far to admit them. The truth is, 
 that so far as you treat a man as an equal, thus far 
 he tends to become one. And I, unlike so many 
 Americans, believe in Democracy. 
 
264 
 
 XXIX. 
 
 BUSINESS. 
 
 Niw YORK, October 90, 
 
 BUSINESS is business all the world over ; so, at least, I 
 have been assured by those who ought to know. But 
 it is more emphatically business in the United States 
 than anywhere else. In England business is business, 
 and there s an end of it ; here business is everything, 
 and there is no end or boundary to it. It affords the 
 one career in the country. Politics is a matter that 
 a citizen must interest himself in one year out of 
 four ; but the class which pursues politics day by day 
 and week by week is a small one, and neither very 
 respectable nor very respected. The Church, litera 
 ture, art, the services they may be all very excel 
 lent things in their way if anybody has the curious 
 fancy to make a life of them. But they are hardly 
 regarded as serious careers. The leading men, go 
 where you will the show citizens that your hos 
 pitable entertainer gives you introductions to are 
 aot any of these; they are the first men of busi- 
 
QUALITY AKD PRICE. 265 
 
 ness. The first men of business are the first men 
 outright. 
 
 It would be idle for me, who do not know the 
 difference between a bill of exchange and a deben 
 ture, to attempt to give any idea of the methods on 
 which American business is conducted. I presume 
 that the law of supply and demand, pending its 
 repeal by President Bryan, is much the same here 
 as at home. Yet I seem to notice a keenness, a 
 cut-throat ferocity of competition in America, which 
 is at least less conspicuous in England. With u* 
 the largest and most largely advertised concerns are 
 not necessarily the best, nor even reputed to be the 
 best. If you want to get a bonnet, as I understand, 
 of the one unmistakable and inimitable distinction, 
 you do not go to Peter Kobinson s or Marshall & 
 Snellgrove s, but to some little half-lighted shop in 
 Bond Street. So with other commodities. The vari 
 ous supply stores and universal providers are a vast 
 convenience, but I have been told that there are 
 wares a shade better to be got elsewhere. But 
 here everybody goes to the big store of the place, for 
 the little ones cannot live with the prices. In Eng 
 land of course with limitations quality rules the 
 market; in America, price. 
 
 For instance, in Philadelphia everybody goes to 
 Wanamaker s. Mr Wanarnaker was once Postmaster- 
 General of the Republic, and I should think he was 
 a rattling good one. His store was already the largest 
 
266 BUSINESS. 
 
 retail drapery and hosiery and haberdashery, and all 
 that sort of business, in the world, when by the 
 recent purchase of a giant establishment in New 
 York he made it more largest still. Now the work 
 ing of Wanamaker s, as I am informed, is this. It 
 is no use going there to get what you want. You 
 must go to get what Mr Wanamaker wants to sell. 
 He tells you each morning in the newspapers what 
 he has got to-day, and if you want it you had better 
 go and get it : the chances are it will be gone to 
 morrow. The head of each department is intrusted 
 with a certain amount of capital, and buys his goods at 
 his own discretion. But woe unto him if he does not 
 turn over his capital quickly. There is a rule that no 
 stock may be in the house more than, I think, three 
 months ; after that off it must go at any sacrifice. 
 
 "You can always tell when Mr Wanamaker s in 
 town," said a shop -walker, "because there s always 
 some change being made." And then he added, in 
 a half -voice of awestricken worship, "I believe Mr 
 "Wanamaker loves change for its own sake." For the 
 sake of custom, I should say; for this formula of 
 change for change s sake is one of the master-keys 
 of American character. Mr Wanamaker keeps a pic 
 ture-gallery, with some really fine modern French 
 paintings, to beguile his patrons. To - day he will 
 have an orchestrion playing, to - morrow a costume 
 exhibition of spinning - girls from all the lands of 
 the earth, every day something new. One day, by 
 
THE WANAMAKEK SYSTEM. 2G7 
 
 moving a table six feet, so that people had to walk 
 round it instead of past it, he increased the sales of 
 an article from three shillings to hundreds of pounds. 
 If that is not genius, tell me what is. 
 
 But the really Napoleonic I was going to say 
 daemonic feature of the Wanamaker system is the 
 unerring skill with which it reaps its profits out of the 
 necessities of others. Fixing his price according to 
 the economic doctrine of final utility taking no ac 
 count, that is, of the cost of production, but only of 
 the price at which most people will find it worth their 
 while to buy Mr Wanamaker realises 10 per cent for 
 himself, and an enormous saving for the consumers. 
 A cargo of rose-trees had been consigned from Holland 
 to a firm of florists, which failed while the plants were 
 in mid-ocean. They went a-begging till Mr Wana 
 maker bought them up and put them on the market 
 at about half the rate current in Philadelphia. In ten 
 days not one of the twenty thousand was left. A firm 
 which manufactured hundred -dollar bicycles found 
 itself without cash to meet its liabilities. Mr Wana 
 maker bought up the stock and altered the maker s 
 label as well as one peculiarity of the gear. Then he 
 broke the price to sixty-six dollars, and subsequently 
 to thirty-three. They all went off in a week or so. 
 He bought the plates of a huge edition of the hundred- 
 dollar Century Dictionary, altered the title-page, bound 
 them for himself, and put the article on the market at 
 fifty-one dollars and a half. In six weeks he had sold 
 
268 BUSINESS. 
 
 two thousand. A firm in California, which manufac 
 tures a particularly excellent kind of blanket, was in 
 difficulties. Mr Wanamaker bought up the stock, and 
 sold it at a third of the normal price in three days. 
 
 All this is magnificent for the customer, and ap 
 parently not unprofitable to Mr Wanamaker. But 
 plainly somebody has to pay, and who ? The small 
 trader. After the rose-tree deal nobody wanted to 
 buy roses of the florists of Philadelphia. The city is 
 stocked with bicycles and Century Dictionaries, and 
 nobody within a radius of miles will want to buy a 
 pair of blankets for a generation. Mr Wanamaker 
 sends out three hundred and sixty-five thousand 
 parcels to his customers in the slackest month of the 
 year, and turns over thirteen million dollars annually. 
 The small people, it is presumed, are ground to powder 
 against the wall. 
 
 Eather similar is the story of Armour s glue-factory 
 in Chicago. Mr Armour s original line in life, as all 
 the world knows, is packing pork. If your tastes lie 
 in the direction of blood, you can spend a happy 
 morning at his place watching dying hogs kick out 
 puncheons of it. Personally I didn t like it. Not 
 that I object either to blood or to pork ; but I resented 
 the way in which the screaming hog, sliding down a 
 rail by one of his hind-legs, is unsympathetically put 
 in position for the knife by a hireling : he might at 
 least be allowed to go to the sticker in his own 
 attitude. But the pork-packing business is not what 
 
ARMOUR S SOAP. 269 
 
 it was, so Mr Armour had to look to his by-products. 
 Nobody would pay him a profitable price, so he went 
 into the by-product business himself. He melts the 
 fat in huge vats, and runs it down into moulds, where 
 it congeals as soap; the soap is run through wires 
 which cut it, and through machines which stamp it, 
 and there you are. The fat that is over from the soap 
 runs into the next room, and runs out of it as glycer 
 ine. The oddments of hide and hoof from the deceased 
 tinned meat are boiled up and cooled and run through 
 wires, and come out glue. The hair and bristles are 
 blown about hydraulically, and heated and cooled and 
 curled, and come out ready for sofa-pillows. The shin- 
 bones reappear as tooth-brushes, or go to Japan for 
 imitation ivory ware ; the odd bones are ground up into 
 manure. The very drippings of the fat are caught in 
 a trap, on the brink of falling into the river, and 
 brought back captive to the soap-kettles. And what 
 results from all this ? Mr Armour, having a world 
 wide repute, and a world-wide business organisation, 
 is underselling the firms which cut the price of his fat 
 and bristles. They squeezed him; now he squeezes 
 them. It is the fortune of war. 
 
 It is not wonderful that producers try to escape 
 from the mutual butchery of business competition 
 by the construction of trusts and combines. It is 
 even less wonderful that the consumer fiercely re 
 sents these. You have only to represent Mr M Kiu- 
 ley as the nominee of the trusts to raise a howl of 
 
270 BUSINESS. 
 
 execration. But to what extent America is really 
 cursed with these organisations it is hard to deter 
 mine. Newspaper agitators see a trust in every 
 thing, from bread down to meat - skewers. I am 
 hardly competent to criticise the statement, but I 
 doubt it. It must be borne in mind that any such 
 combination to regulate the price of a necessity of 
 life is illegal in this country, and it is hardly cred 
 ible that if they existed widely evidence would not 
 be found to convict their members, at least occa 
 sionally. For instance, it is fairly certain that there 
 is a trust in anthracite coal. That was as good as 
 proved by the fact that a number of tenders being 
 recently made for coal in Chicago, half-a-dozen firms 
 quoted widely different figures for bituminous coal, 
 but all the same high price for anthracite. Legal 
 proceedings were pending, or said to be, when I left 
 Chicago. On the other hand, it is urged that the 
 Standard Oil Company, an arrant and unblushing 
 trust, has been the means of supplying very excel 
 lent oil to everybody at a very low price. It seeks 
 its profits by the extended use of oil rather than 
 by a high price by making it cheap instead of 
 dear. Of course, this is no justification for leaving 
 trusts unregulated by law; that would be madness 
 in any State. For the more the Standard Oil Trust 
 allures the consumer to make oil a necessity of life, 
 the more helpless he will be delivered into its hands 
 when some day it sees fit to pocket untold millions by 
 
BAD AND GOOD. 271 
 
 raising the price. But I believe I may be wrong 
 that the present necessity for such regulation is lim 
 ited to a very few cases. 
 
 But I am straying away from the question. What is 
 tlu> effect of this universality of business in America ? 
 It has its murderous side, as we have seen. The weak 
 men who go down are not pitied, and especially not 
 respected. They are dead failures. In Europe there 
 remain some kindly superstitions under which the un 
 successful may take refuge from public contempt. A 
 man may be incompetent, but after all he is of good 
 family ; he is well educated ; he is a fine musician ; he 
 is a witty fellow. But in America the man who fails 
 in business has failed in the one thing there is to do. 
 The one test of worth in business is to make money, 
 for that is the object of business. Failing in that, his 
 failure is absolute. 
 
 But there is another side. In the first place, the 
 pre-eminence of business is a great clip that holds 
 this unwieldy country together. An active man of 
 business will have interests in every quarter of the 
 States. These interests compel him to know every 
 part of the country, its economic conditions, the 
 habits, pursuits, and character of its inhabitants. 
 But for this bond I verily believe the Union would 
 go to pieces in a twelvemonth. But contact with all 
 parts of the country brings understanding, rubs the 
 edge off prejudice, promotes a candid consideration 
 of the position of others. Prejudiced or uninformed 
 
272 BUSINESS. 
 
 the American may sometimes be ; wantonly unjust 
 I say it deliberately never. Another good result, as 
 I take it, of the deification of business is that it keeps 
 democracy fresh and wholesome. Commerce is the 
 most democratic of all pursuits. In the august pre 
 sence of the dollar all men are equal. It is not this 
 man who graduated at Harvard against that man who 
 herded swine ; it is this man s credit and capital as 
 set down in Bradstreet an amiable little work which 
 gives the money value of every business man in the 
 States, and computes the degree of trust that may be 
 reposed in his signed paper as against that other 
 man s. 
 
 But all this is hideously materialistic. No doubt : 
 only what do you mean by materialistic ? In a sense, 
 which I will explain in a page or two, the Americans 
 appear to me the most materialistic people in the 
 world. But as for the love of money, I don t think 
 they are down with it any worse than any other 
 people. I still think, as I said at the very beginning, 
 that it is not the dollars they worship but the facul 
 ties that got them. The man who has made money 
 in this country has attained what is the one aim of 
 ninety-nine out of every hundred of his countrymen. 
 He has had the ability to do what everybody is trying 
 to do. Is it wonderful that he is respected? It 
 would be wonderful indeed if he were not. 
 
 Cut off from the hard-won civilisation of the Old 
 World, and left to struggle by themselves with the 
 
THE GREAT GAME. 273 
 
 forest and the prairie, it was inevitable that the 
 Americans should prize most highly those less highly- 
 organised qualities of the mind which insured success 
 in the struggle. The others may come with time. In 
 the meanwhile there is this consolation for those who 
 go down. Failure may be complete, but it is never 
 irredeemable. In Europe a boy goes into a bank ; he 
 may hate it, but in the bank he usually remains. In 
 America he will next appear in a newspaper office, 
 then behind a draper s counter, then in Congress, then 
 in bankruptcy, and then in a gold-mine. You never 
 meet the man who has got a good place and don t 
 mean to lose it. No place is good enough for the 
 American s estimate of his own deserts nor is the 
 estimate inexcusable, for no possibility is beyond his 
 legitimate aspiration. Nobody is ever done with. 
 And this applies to the millionaire as well as to the 
 starveling. A man of huge fortune is always break 
 ing out, like Mr Armour, into some new and unfamil 
 iar trade. I have met a gentleman who made a large 
 fortune as an ironmaster. One day it occurred to him 
 to buy a newspaper. He did not know small pica 
 from nonpareil, and by the time he was mastering the 
 difference his fortune had melted away, and he had a 
 mortgage on the house his wife and children lived in. 
 He went about his business with an unmoved face. 
 Why not? This was his life. He was playing the 
 great game for the pleasure of playing it; and he 
 played it and won it like a man. 
 
 S 
 
274 
 
 XXX. 
 
 WAITING. 
 
 NEW YORK, November 2. 
 
 I LANDED myself in New York just in time for the 
 biggest political demonstration in the world s history. 
 Exactly how many men turned out on Saturday to 
 parade for M Kinley and Gold it is hard to estimate. 
 The Silver partisans admit that more than eighty 
 thousand men marched in the great procession, while 
 enthusiastic gold-bugs put the figure at nearly double. 
 Probably a hundred to a hundred and ten thousand 
 would about hit it. Anyhow, there were so many that 
 it hardly matters to an odd ten thousand how many 
 there were. It was the greatest assembly of organ 
 ised men this country has seen since the muster of 
 Union veterans in Washington to disband after the 
 close of the Civil War. It is estimated that there 
 were more men tramping the streets of New York 
 in Saturday s parade than there are voters in the 
 States of Colorado, Idaho, and Nevada put together. 
 There was every manner of man in the procession: 
 
MEN, MEN, MEN; FLAGS, FLAGS, FLAGS. 275 
 
 millionaires in shining silk hats, and working men 
 in corduroy trousers. The men in one line alone 
 were appraised by expert valuers at thirty million 
 dollars. The head of the procession reached the re 
 viewing stand in Madison Square at a quarter to 
 eleven in the morning; the tail did not arrive until 
 half-past six in the evening. Looking from the win 
 dow of the Daily Mail office, Fifth Avenue was 
 dark for miles with the steadily rolling lines of par- 
 aders. Nobody ever saw so many American flags 
 in one day. Every man shouldered this weapon, and 
 the blending of the red, white, and blue made a violet 
 embroidery over the black masses. 
 
 As a pageant it was far inferior to the parade I 
 saw in Chicago the other day. There were no gor 
 geous floats in yesterday s procession, a huge gold- 
 bug on wheels being the nearest approach to that 
 sort of embellishment. There were few horsemen, 
 and little saffron or cloth-of-gold. But there were 
 more men. It was hopeless to try and watch it. 
 You looked at a mile or two of it, went away, came 
 back, and there were miles on miles still filing past. 
 Always the same men, carrying the same flags. Yet 
 hundreds of thousands of people stood gazing at the 
 monotonous marching all day. Tens of thousands 
 of men fell in line under the blazing sun after an 
 early breakfast, and did not disband till the cold 
 stars were out. Why ? Because this solemn pro 
 fession of allegiance was a sacrament of political 
 
276 WAITING. 
 
 faith, and it would have been almost impious to 
 get ill and go home. As the day wore on the 
 multitude only became the more enthusiastic. The 
 parade, which in the morning was loosely coupled 
 and almost apathetic, wound up at night with salvoes 
 of cheers and the enthusiastic singing of patriotic 
 songs. The whole thing was prodigious, crushing, 
 final. 
 
 After the parade had disbanded thousands lingered 
 round the scene of it. They had made the supreme 
 effort of the campaign, and had nothing left to do. 
 Many turned to needed but injudicious refreshment. 
 At dead of night, when rival Bryan and M Kinley 
 meetings were held in Madison Square, the opposing 
 crowds exchanged first arguments, then fierce volleys 
 of cheers ; presently the cheers became insults, and 
 then the insults became assaults. The first faction- 
 fight of the campaign in New York was promisingly 
 under way when the police arrived. The New York 
 police may have political sympathies, but duty, and 
 the pleasure of knocking citizens about, transcend all 
 minor emotions. The embattled hosts walked hastily 
 and ingloriously away before the truncheons. Each 
 party accuses the other of provocation, but the real 
 instigator of the riot was whisky on an empty stomach. 
 Sunday morning found the streets still strewn with 
 fragments of the great parade. Early-retiring citizens 
 awakened in the middle of the night with a start to 
 find the last echoes of belated cheers breaking round 
 
WALL STREET S STOCKING. 277 
 
 their pillows. It must have been nearly daylight 
 before the police finally swept up the scraps, and then 
 New York enjoyed such quiet as it ever gets. 
 
 Yet even on Saturday night hundreds gathered 
 quietly in the hotels of the city, not discussing, not 
 drinking doing nothing but simply waiting the 
 result. New York is holding its breath ready to 
 break out in huzzas or lamentations, according as the 
 dice may fall. Never was so huge a mass of people 
 so completely centred in one thing. In Wall Street 
 there is no panic, but utter stagnation. The modern 
 machinery of credit has ceased work, and business 
 is set back centuries to the primitive conditions of 
 hoard and barter. Nobody carries stock on credit, 
 nobody buys, nobody lends. A man came in 
 desperately to a leading lawyer the other day in 
 deathly want of cash. He had two hundred thou 
 sand dollars worth of Government bonds, but nobody 
 would lend him a cent on them. A Jewish banker 
 put the case well when he said: "Wall Street can 
 take care of itself with a gold standard, and it can 
 take care of itself with a silver standard. But the 
 devil of it is getting from one to the other. You can 
 sail a boat above Niagara, and below Niagara ; but 
 try to sail down Niagara, and where are you ? " So 
 the Wall Street broker to-day is hoarding his hidden 
 gold in a stocking like a French peasant. 
 
 To flat Sunday has succeeded interminable Monday. 
 Even to me the suspense, the idleness, has been un- 
 
278 WAITING. 
 
 bearable. I could not sit still. I wandered vaguely 
 about the street looking for something interesting 
 and not finding it. And if it took the unprejudiced 
 spectator in this way, what about the millions of 
 actors in the momentous drama? For them the 
 suspense is little less than an agony. Their work 
 is over, yet somehow they have had to put in 
 twenty -four hours without seeing the fruit of it. 
 It is like the breathless interval between the firing 
 of a cannon and the hearing of the report, when every 
 second seems a year. Or you may say New York is 
 like a besieged city, hanging, heart in mouth, upon 
 tidings that may mean salvation and may mean ruin. 
 It is done now, and there is nothing to do but wait. 
 Yet upon men s minds there presses a sickening 
 suspicion that they may have been forgotten some 
 effort left unmade which it is now too late to make. 
 New York is pretending to go about its business 
 more for the sake of giving itself an occupation than 
 in the expectation that the pretence will impose upon 
 anybody. The clamorous city roars according to its 
 wont, but the roar rings hollow somehow. Through 
 it all you can hear New York s heart beat. 
 
 Having nothing else to talk about, people are still 
 living on Saturday s parade. " You d have wanted 
 ten thousand police and soldiers to keep that crowd 
 in order in London," I heard a fat man say. It is 
 strange that the travelled American seldom seems to 
 bring back the .same high estimate of the orderly 
 
THE AFTERMATH OF THE PARADE. 279 
 
 behaviour of our crowds and the moderation of our 
 police which we congratulate ourselves upon. For 
 myself, I admit the good behaviour of the American 
 crowd freely, but I also stoutly maintain that of ours. 
 As to police, though the New York Irishman may 
 not be quite so bad as he is sometimes painted, and 
 especially behaves very well to women, I will back 
 ours for courtesy and self-control any day of the 
 week. But what, am I about to begin talking other 
 things than politics on this day ? We are not here 
 to consider Saturday s crowd as a work of art, but 
 as a M Kinley vote - machine. Most people say it 
 settled the matter. Of course it didn t : how could 
 it ? What bearing had the fact that a hundred 
 thousand men paraded New York to do with the 
 rural vote of Indiana? And the last is a vital 
 factor ; the Republicanism of New York has been 
 discounted long ago. All the same, you see here the 
 psychological effect of the great demonstration. If 
 it has done nothing else, it has given men confidence, 
 and persuaded the waverer that by voting for M Kin- 
 ley he will put himself on the winning side. 
 
 Musing thus, I thought I would go across Broadway 
 to my old acquaintance, Mr St John, at the Demo 
 cratic headquarters, and see what he had got to say. 
 There is no great profit in visits to headquarters, for 
 they will only tell you what they think good for you, 
 and what they think good for you you can read in 
 every newspaper. But I found Mr St John genuinely 
 
280 WAITING. 
 
 and incurably optimistic. Not a doubt of Mr Bryan s 
 election ! Illinois in particular quite certain ! In the 
 latest table given out by Senator Jones, the Demo 
 cratic chairman, at Chicago, Illinois was classed as 
 doubtfuL Now as no chairman s estimate was ever 
 known to err on the side of moderation, this means 
 that Illinois is given up as lost. But Mr St John 
 would not hear of it. " We shall carry Illinois," he 
 cried, cheerfully. " Shall you carry New York ? " I 
 asked, not without irony. " Yes," he began " but 
 no ; I won t say that. But I do say we shall 
 astonish a great many people. I m not going on 
 figures; I don t care a hang about figures. What I 
 go by is this. This is a great popular moment, and 
 the most experienced canvasser can t estimate or 
 measure its impetus. Why, take the case of Henry 
 George when he ran for Mayor in 1886. On paper 
 he hadn t got a chance, but he very nearly got in. 
 Kemember that George is working on our side in 
 this election. Why, I heard something the other day 
 about a bank here. Its president is a great M Kinley 
 man makes speeches and all the rest of it. Now, 
 the fifty clerks in that bank probably all marched in 
 the parade on Saturday. But I know that out of the 
 fifty only eight mean to vote for M Kinley." 
 
 Undeniably there is something in Mr St John s 
 point of view. That is not a mere fancy of my own ; 
 it is proved by the attitude of many of the hottest 
 believers in M Kinley s chance. If ever there was a 
 
MR BRYAN S CAMPAIGN. 281 
 
 certainty on the book, this election is a certainty for 
 M Kinley. But yet any element of the incalculable 
 and unexpected must make in favour of Bryan. The 
 influential men who have gained support for the gold 
 candidate are not quite so sure of their influence after 
 all. The votes are promised all right, and totted up 
 in the Republican forecasts. But I have met more 
 than one Kepublican who has frankly owned that he 
 will feel more comfortable when the votes have been 
 given and counted. Nobody can see how it is pos 
 sible for Mr Bryan to win, and yet nobody would be 
 surprised if he did. 
 
 No doubt a good deal of this is due to the extra 
 ordinary personal campaign that Mr Bryan has made. 
 Nobody quite knows what he is doing in the middle 
 States whether he is wasting his breath or turning 
 votes by the thousand. In any case, he is fighting 
 up to the last moment, and fighting this very day as 
 resolutely and as vigorously as he fought on the day 
 of his nomination. Win or lose, he has done his best, 
 p.nd perhaps made the finest campaign since election 
 campaigns were invented. Every newspaper is full 
 of the thousands of miles he has travelled, the hun 
 dreds of speeches he has made, the millions of electors 
 who have heard the sound of his voice, and the billions 
 of words that voice has uttered. Consider it merely 
 as a feat of physical endurance, and this iron man 
 must be pronounced one of the phenomena of the 
 nineteenth century. Through it all he has not lost 
 
282 WAITING. 
 
 one meal or one night s sleep. 1 But it has wanted 
 courage as well as strength. He has seen the en 
 thusiasm of his first day s candidature fade away into 
 the M Kinley reaction. He must know he has been 
 struggling to stem a torrent instead of floating on it 
 and that to the demagogic temperament is no light 
 trial. And he has been struggling alone. Not one 
 Democrat of high reputation has come forward on 
 his side. His Altgelds and his Tillmans are notori 
 ous, indeed, but their notoriety has done him more 
 harm than good. His loneliness is the blackest omen 
 against him, since, if astute men of the Hill stamp 
 thought he were going to win, they would be found 
 at his side to share the spoil. He has fought the 
 battle alone, and he has fought it with an elastic 
 toughness, an unshaken courage, an unflagging fer 
 vour, that lifts him to the highest rank of popular 
 leaders alongside of Gladstone and Gambetta. 
 
 With Monday s dusk New York has awakened from 
 its two days torpor. As darkness cleared the traffic 
 from the streets you might see here or there a 
 dense knot of men gathered at a corner. You would 
 have said a fight or a fit. Hurrying, up you found 
 nothing but two champions discussing the currency 
 in semi -public. The listeners now applauded, now 
 mocked, but not one would tear himself away. The 
 hall of the Hoffman House, where by good luck rather 
 
 1 On the day after his defeat he ate a beef -steak and four eggs for 
 breakfast. That is what I call a man. 
 
AT THE HOFFMAN HOUSE. 283 
 
 than judgment I put up, presented a mixture of 
 Tattersall s King on a Derby Day and the lobby of 
 the House of Commons on the fall of a Ministry. 
 There were in the jostling crowd bookmakers, par 
 sons, financiers, and clerks, men with white ties and 
 men with no collars. You could not move, much 
 less hear yourself speak, and by reason of the press 
 they had ceased to serve cocktails at the bar. In 
 the centre of the crowd were groups of political 
 plungers, and now and again above the general 
 tumult you heard their raucous voices calling the 
 latest odds on M Kinley. Yet there was very little 
 betting. The contest was considered all one way, 
 and though no end of information could be found 
 that whole streets full of working men had resolved 
 to vote for Bryan, the Eepublicans had established 
 a funk. So the betting languished, and interest in 
 offered odds palled, till the crowd fell back on 
 the exhausting but unexhausted currency discussion. 
 Several Free Silver meetings disengaged themselves. 
 The Gold men responded to their vociferous argu 
 ments with an occasional jeer, but mostly contented 
 themselves with the unanswerable repartee of putting 
 up money to bet. The mass thinned out towards 
 midnight, but again the crowds gathered outside and 
 rang the chimes of the small hours with peals of 
 cheers rolling down the echoing streets. 
 To-morrow ! 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 or 
 
284 
 
 XXXT. 
 
 THF, DAY. 
 
 NEW YORK, November 4. 
 
 THE belated demonstrators were hardly silent when 
 the day of destiny dawned. And almost before it 
 had actually dawned the day s work had begun. The 
 polls open at six o clock in New York, and even b) 
 that hour millionaire and beggar had lined up in front 
 of the polling-booths as if they were the pit-door of 
 a theatre. The strain of the last few days had be 
 come no longer bearable. Nobody could lie abed 
 when the moment for action had at last come. Un- 
 breakfasted, unwashed, unclothed, all hastened to get 
 the momentous vote off their chests. The clustering 
 figures in the half-daylight, muffled in overcoats, re 
 called an Oxford undergraduates eight o clock roll- 
 call. 
 
 It must be explained that Americans do not vote, 
 like us, in a public building. During the last few 
 days broad, dark-green wooden sheds have squatted 
 on the streets all over the city. In these tabernacles 
 
A DESERTED CITY. 285 
 
 they take the sacrament of citizenship. In the poorer 
 quarters, where the streets are narrower, shops are 
 consecrated to the solemn rite. Usually cigar-stores 
 are chosen sometimes, with genial irony for the de 
 feated candidate, an undertaker s. 
 
 By the time the city ordinarily wakes up nearly 
 half the votes had been cast. Already New York, its 
 duty done, had settled itself down to enjoy a holiday 
 under the clear sunlight of an Indian summer s day. 
 The polling - places were soon deserted, but for a 
 little knot of party watchers, tallymen all decked out 
 with ribbons like prize shorthorns, and the police. 
 Earely a candidate or some high party official bustled 
 up on a tour of inspection ; then the oracle of the 
 voice of the people sank back into dumbness again. 
 The party headquarters were no longer crowded as in 
 past days. Only a few devotees were there, keeping 
 lists and receiving reports from the poll ing -places. 
 Tammany Hall itself was half empty, and almost 
 silent. Wall Street and the other business quarters 
 were ablaze with the national colours, but there were 
 no business men. The Broadway shops and restaurants 
 were all decked out in bunting, but all were closed. 
 Fifth Avenue was as depopulated as in the middle of 
 August. The mean streets of the East Side were filled 
 with unshaven men, slatternly women, and barefooted 
 children. But this assemblage was merely because 
 here the street takes the place of the country and the 
 seaside. Only at rare street corners stood three or 
 
286 1HE DAY. 
 
 four men, with puckered faces, wondering why Mike 
 OTlaherty had not voted yet. Meanwhile crowds of 
 people were streaming to the ferries and the railway 
 stations, seeking the country. The streets gradually 
 filled with citizens wives and children, all in their 
 Sunday clothes. It was a Sabbath without any Sab 
 batarianism. You would say the city was quietly 
 enjoying victory instead of being in the midst of 
 battle. 
 
 But this is a day of vast activity for the street 
 Arabs of New York. It is their day of days in the 
 four long years. From early dawn they began to 
 collect every available sort of material for bonfires. 
 Their Guy Fawkes day is a movable feast, dependent 
 on the day of election. All day long they steal 
 barrels, and planks, and straw, and boxes, under the 
 very noses of the tolerant proprietors. Impatient en 
 thusiasts had little fires crackling, in full sunlight and 
 in the middle of the street, as early as nine o clock. 
 For the rest, the only signs of public excitement were 
 the dense black masses of people fringing the pave 
 ment opposite all the newspaper offices awaiting tid 
 ings not yet due for six hours. Altogether it was a 
 day of waiting, but of waiting that was endurable 
 compared with yesterday s. To-day each man had 
 done all that in him lay, and he could await the result 
 with clean-conscienced resignation. 
 
 But the polling was hardly over when the supreme 
 day became merged in a supreme night. It was a day 
 
THE DIGNITY OF DEMOCRACY. 287 
 
 for work, which had been done in perfect order, and 
 with a calmness and a dignity that fitted the moment 
 ous occasion. Mr Koosevelt, New York s Chief Com 
 missioner of Police, told me that this was the most 
 peacefully conducted election in American history. 
 Hardly an arrest was made all day. The very Italian 
 roadmakers and the Yiddish hucksters put 011 charac 
 ter for one day, and carried themselves as citizens 
 worthy of their citizenship. 
 
 But the night was given to a gluttony of sensation, 
 after the suspense between triumph and despair in the 
 last hour. Before the polls closed, at five o clock, New 
 York had settled down to an emotional debauch. The 
 city was drained dry of voters early in the day, and 
 the closest polling organisation hardly squeezed out a 
 single elector in that last hour. Now to see if the 
 great struggle of six months should issue in a burst of 
 prosperity or in collapse and ruin ! 
 
 Hours before any news was possible great crowds 
 had massed in the City Hall Park and in Printing 
 House Square. Here are most of the great news 
 paper offices, packed together even closer than in 
 London. One big building is shared by both Silver 
 and Gold newspapers. Caricatures, separated only by 
 a window, showed any given statesman as the saviour 
 of his country or as an embezzler of public funds, 
 according to the taste of the exhibitor and the observer. 
 The stereopticon bulletin shows being so close to 
 gether, they could be depended on for an entertaining 
 
288 THE DAY. 
 
 rivalry of picturesque sensation, which New York 
 resolved to enjoy to the full. The towering face of 
 the World building was masked by an enormous 
 screen, and half-a-dozen other newspaper buildings 
 were almost as generously furnished with raw material 
 for the cartoons and bulletins that should move to 
 laughter or to tears. One could hardly move there 
 by five o clock ; by six, when the first meagre results 
 began to come in, the crush was almost terrifying in 
 its immeasurable and ungovernable force. 
 
 Meanwhile, inside the newspaper offices the most 
 important work in four years was progressing fever 
 ishly. Only highly authenticated visitors were per 
 mitted inside to-night. To realise the work before the 
 newspaper you must remember that thirteen millions 
 of votes were coming in from points three thousand 
 miles apart, some of them three hours in time behind 
 the others. On the basis of whatever flimsy indica 
 tions arrived before press-time the paper must cal 
 culate a result for the whole country, whose accuracy 
 might make or mar. The biggest room in each office 
 was laid out with trestle-tables, whereat sat men adding, 
 subtracting, and multiplying. Each man had in his 
 head, or at least on paper at his side, the vote of 1892 
 in every county and precinct, in order to estimate from 
 the early returns of the smallest village the probable 
 trend and force of the stream sweeping over the whole 
 country. The opinion of thousands of counties had 
 thus to be dealt with, and the complexity and magni- 
 
IN CITY HALL PARK. 289 
 
 tude of the task strained every rivet in the newspaper 
 organisation. The scene inside the office was a com 
 bination of mad confusion and perfect harmony. A 
 little army of boys were flying with telegraphic results 
 to the calculators, and flying back with each result 
 reduced to its proper place in the general scheme. 
 The calculators mopped their brows without speaking, 
 and calculated fiercely. 
 
 The anxious crowd outside surged denser and more 
 terrible in its ungovernable weight. Thousands stood 
 craning their necks to the walls of the huge buildings 
 before them, faintly outlined against the deep sky. 
 Search -lights spun round the horizon, lighting up 
 signal-kites floating aloft. On the screens appeared 
 scenes shown by the cinematographe, which were 
 received with alternate delight and derision. When 
 the first returns were shown the crowd lost mastery 
 of itself. The City Hall Park is cut up by public 
 buildings, with parallelograms and triangles of grass. 
 The crowd broke against the wire fences, swept them 
 down, and surged over the sacred enclosures. It 
 could not help it. The laws of space and force were 
 the only things that had not taken a night off for the 
 election. 
 
 From the first moment of the arrival of returns, 
 the direction of the stream was clearly apparent. 
 New York City, where never before had a majority 
 been given for a Republican President, was going 
 steadily and surely for Mr M Kinley. One hundred 
 
290 THE DAY. 
 
 districts, two hundred districts, three hundred dis 
 tricts, were heard from, and Mr M Kinley forged 
 steadily ahead, till his majority in the city was certain 
 to be at least 20,000. Then the serried masses began 
 to open their lungs, and fierce yells and whoops and 
 cheers crashed from side to side of the great square. 
 
 Passing north-eastward through the city was like 
 passing from a mill-race to a mill-pool. The poverty- 
 stricken streets, where three hours before one could 
 hardly move for the crowds of dirty aliens lounging 
 away the holiday on the pavement, were now silent 
 and dark, save where the chartered sons of the gutter 
 danced and whooped around the bonfires. Early 
 in the day these had been made from purloined boxes 
 and barrels; now they were being fed with straw 
 mattresses and cheap furniture. But the adults, 
 the Italians, Poles, and miscellaneous Yiddishers, 
 were still under the spell of their brief dignity of 
 citizenship. 
 
 At the main police office was an election bureau 
 for receiving the first official counts of the city voting. 
 The bare flagstones of the stairs rang with the hasty 
 heels of journalists scurrying up and down with 
 despatches. In the court-room was assembled a job 
 lot of curious listeners, and from time to time the 
 officials enthroned on the bench hastily snatched 
 papers from hurrying messengers and read aloud a 
 bulletin putting a fresh nail in the coffin of Bryanism. 
 The listening loafers chaffed the police and indulged 
 
"THAT SETTLES IT." 291 
 
 in good-natured horseplay, while the constables laid 
 aside their official majesty and worked away indus 
 triously with paper, pencil, and figures like ordinary 
 commoners. In Commissioner Eoosevelt s room was 
 a tape telegraph-machine, ticking away feverishly. 
 
 Now began the announcements of voting in the 
 country outside of New York. Chicago came along, 
 swinging heavily to M Kinley. Then came Kentucky, 
 and like portents, in crushing sequence, from East 
 and West and South. " That settles it," snapped out 
 a hard sharp voice, at the announcement of the 
 certain defeat of Governor Altgeld in Illinois, and 
 smiles wreathed the hard bitter face of an old in 
 spector standing beside the instrument. Word quickly 
 ran along the sentinels in the corridors and on the 
 stairs of the downfall of the enemy of the law. The 
 telegraph clicked more breathlessly, the official roared 
 out the results more lustily, the journalists scurried 
 about more wildly as the returns from everywhere 
 came tumbling over each other, all pointing the same 
 way. 
 
 Thence I went up deserted Broadway to Madison 
 Square. Here a dense crowd was packed across the 
 thoroughfare before the bulletin-boards of the up-town 
 newspaper offices. Here doubt was dispelled in a 
 frenzy of triumph. Many of the announcements were 
 premature and incorrect, but enough was quickly 
 known to send the watchers mad, and the air was 
 torn with cheers. But loud above the cheers and the 
 
292 THE DAY. 
 
 crackle of laughter that swept the crowds when the 
 stereoptician joked, above the grinding of the cable- 
 cars elbowing their way and banging their gongs, 
 arose the deafening blast of tin horns, which were 
 sold by hundreds in the crowd. At each new triumph 
 of Republicanism the ear-splitting bray of these tin 
 trumpets boomed out. This was the form which the 
 voice of the people chose to manifest its exultation. 
 White men and black men, sober men and hilarious 
 men, young men, staid middle- age and grey-beards, 
 matrons and maidens, all were gravely tootling these 
 babies tin trumpets. Everybody was too exultant to 
 care whether lie behaved like an infant or not. There 
 was no escape from the infernal din. 
 
 At the Republican headquarters I found the worn, 
 pale, sleepless heroes of the fight summoning their last 
 energies to. revel without affectation of self-control in 
 the brilliancy of their victory. Here, again, of course, 
 were the newspaper-men, gathering the threads of 
 information despatched to headquarters, and weaving 
 them together into the complete tale of triumph. But 
 hardly anybody was now concerned to add and com 
 pare returns. White-bearded, frock-coated men were 
 rushing about shaking hands with everybody in 
 sight. The rooms echoed with the ripple of light- 
 hearted girls laughter. A little army of waiters was 
 perspiringly trying to keep pace with the unquench 
 able demand for champagne. Distracted with delight, 
 the solid pillars of Sound Money could only laugh 
 
FRENZY. 293 
 
 and babble, and hurry from the tape to the window 
 and from the window back to the tape. Their joy 
 would not allow them to keep still one second. 
 
 At Democratic headquarters things were very differ 
 ent. Here was only lassitude after effort. There was 
 no victory or champagne to fillip it into a flicker of 
 animation. Everything and every one was most 
 gloomily silent, with the exception of a few un 
 conquerable optimists, who were still vainly trying 
 to demonstrate that maturer returns might retrieve all. 
 Tammany Hall gave up the struggle early, and by 
 eleven o clock was black and voiceless. Jeering 
 enemies encamped on its steps undisturbed and un 
 answered. 
 
 Passing on to the University Club, I found every 
 member present exulting and dancing like schoolboys, 
 as a waiter read item after item of the colossal pile of 
 victories. These fine gentlemen of New York cried for 
 cheers for M Kinley, hurled stentorian congratulations 
 at entering friends, clasped each other round the waist 
 by threes and fours, and waltzed round the room under 
 the approving smiles of the head- waiters. 
 
 My next task was to fight my way up to Herald 
 Square. Here were two cinematographies at work, 
 but by now the people hardly deigned to glance at 
 them. This was the climax. No longer was the 
 crowd made up of men and women, but of rejoicing 
 machines. The wide square was one riot of de 
 lirium. The crowd spread itself over the tram rails, 
 
294 THE DAY. 
 
 and almost sought to push back the crawling cable- 
 cars which attempted to jostle them from an im 
 mediate view of the next undreamed-of success posted 
 on the bulletins. Now rockets and Roman candles 
 were blazing on every side. Gunpowder flared, bands 
 crashed, bugles rang; overhead the late trains puffed 
 and clattered, and above all rang volleys of cheers 
 and the interminable discordant blare of tin trumpets, 
 all blended in a furious jangle of jubilation. The 
 whole place was mad, demoniac, inspired with a 
 divine frenzy. 
 
 But by now it was well past midnight. Reports 
 came rarely; the lights be^an to go out; gangs of 
 young men with linked arms charged and split up 
 the thinning crowd. The elevated trains and the 
 cable-cars making for the northern suburbs looked as 
 though human bees had swarmed over them. Every 
 inch of floor and outside platform had a foot clinging 
 precariously to it. People were even hanging desper 
 ately from the brakes and couplings. So New York 
 began to empty, the vast assemblage falling asleep 
 with the reaction from an excitement that was almost 
 too intense for life. And through the crowd came 
 pushing a man with matted hair crying the morning 
 papers. 
 
 The night of nights was justified of its supreme 
 destiny. The expectation had been the tensest for a 
 generation, but the realisation had risen to it and had 
 
THE DAWN. 295 
 
 overwhelmed it. The last screams of jubilation grew 
 fainter and more distant; gradually the glamour of 
 the dream wore off, and the city paled to ordinary 
 dawn and ordinary day. New York was her daily 
 self again, with the most stirring night of her recent 
 fate behind her. 
 
296 
 
 XXXII. 
 
 THE OUTLOOK. 
 
 Ss. AUGUSTA VICTORIA, November 7. 
 
 WELL, it is all over, and William M Kinley is to be 
 the twenty-fifth President of the United States. What 
 then ? What has been accomplished by the six months 
 of stress and conflict ? What is to be the ultimate 
 fate of free silver and free trade ? Has the incoming 
 surge of anarchy been swept back for good, or is it 
 retiring only to thunder in again with tenfold violence 
 on some future day, to engulf industry and order, pro 
 tection and free trade, labour and capital together ? 
 
 Almost the last words of Mr Bryan before the 
 declaration of the polls were to the effect that if he 
 were beaten this time he was ready to begin work at 
 once on the campaign of 1900. He has been beaten, 
 and, being a man of indomitable energy and un 
 quenchable faith, news comes that he is all ready to 
 fulfil his word. But the most indomitable general 
 cannot fight battles without soldiers, nor yet with 
 mutinous soldiers. The doctrine of free coinage lay 
 
HOW THE FIG 11 T WAS LOST. 297 
 
 never really at the heart of the rank and file of Demo 
 crats. In the Rocky Mountains every man, Demo 
 crat or Republican, was white-hot for it, because it 
 meant more mines working, more miners wanted to 
 work them, and more money to be spent generally. 
 The western farmer was for free coinage because he 
 thought it offered a hope of better prices, and no other 
 hope was on his horizon. The South was for free 
 silver, partly for the same reason and partly because 
 the North was against it. 
 
 But the Democrats of the North and East and 
 central States cared no more for free silver than the 
 rank and file of English Radicals in 1886 cared for 
 Home Rule. They voted for it partly because it was 
 the regular and official programme of their party, and 
 partly because, since the partial free trade of the 
 Wilson tariff had not brought prosperity, there was 
 nothing else handy to vote for. And partly they did 
 not vote for it at all. It is in these districts, East of 
 the Mississippi and North of Mason and Dixon s line, 
 that the loss of Democratic votes lost the fight for 
 Mr Bryan ; it is here that he must seek to win them 
 back if the defeat of 1896 is to lead up to the victory 
 of 1900. The National Democrats, the schismatics 
 who supported the gold standard, hoped that a smash 
 ing defeat this year would throw the party back into 
 their arms. They talked of holding a convention in 
 Chicago within sixty days of the election to reorganise 
 the party on a gold basis. Two days after the election 
 
298 THE OUTLOOK. 
 
 proposals were actually on foot for some such re 
 organisation in the State of New York, to include all 
 the old leaders, like Mr Cleveland s personal following, 
 Senator Hill, and others who have stood out of this 
 campaign. But such reconciliations, easy enough to 
 project, are exceedingly hard to bring to realisation. 
 The beaten majority will never come, cap in hand, to 
 the minority who have purchased victory by deserting 
 to the enemy. It was found impracticable in Eng 
 land, and it is very questionable if any number of 
 round-table conferences will bring it about in the 
 United States. 
 
 The Free Silver Democrats are rancorously bitter 
 against the Gold Democrats, and the petty vote 
 realised by the latter at the polls is hardly worth 
 eating humble-pie for. If the National Democrats 
 could make it clear to the others that reunion would 
 afford a really promising chance of victory in 1900, 
 with attendant spoils, there might be something to 
 say. But it is not easy to see how this is to be 
 done. 
 
 Failing this chance, there is the free silver agitation 
 to go on with. If Mr Bryan is to lead the next cam 
 paign, his obstinate fanaticism on the subject of silver 
 will rule out any other question as the main issue. 
 Supposing that in 1900 the country is in a state of 
 commercial depression, anything like the depression 
 of this year, that campaign would stand an admirable 
 chance of success. All over the country people will 
 
PROTECTION ? 299 
 
 have come to think there might have been something 
 in free silver after all. That is what some of the 
 most level-headed Westerners are counting on. But 
 unless the North and East are depressed in 1900, 
 then it is hard to see what other device can be used 
 to make free coinage attractive in those regions. At 
 present, being blamed for this year s disaster, it is a 
 great deal less popular than ever. 
 
 At any rate, the Democratic party, beaten, divided, 
 leaderless, split with mutual recriminations, jealousies, 
 and distrusts, is done with for the four years of Mr 
 M Kinley s term. It may form up again in face of the 
 enemy, as it has often done before. It will hardly 
 do so sooner, for we need not take the projected con 
 vention at Denver too seriously. What use will Mr 
 M Kinley make of the field left clear to him ? His 
 own political vision has room but for a single idea 
 Protection. No doubt there will be influences to 
 make against any extreme revision of the tariff. The 
 Gold Democrats will urge indeed, they began it the 
 day after the election that Mr M Kinley is the elect, 
 not of a party, but of the best elements of the whole 
 nation. They will urge that they were the main 
 agency of his victory, and charge him with black 
 ingratitude if he countenances any advance in protec 
 tive dues beyond what is at present urgently needed 
 to balance revenue and expenditure. 
 
 Another influence against Protection will be the 
 Senate. It is true that the Senate of ] 897 will have, 
 
300 THE OUTLOOK. 
 
 on paper, a Republican majority of half-a-dozen or 
 so. But this includes the Senators from the silver 
 States Colorado, Utah, Nevada, Idaho, and Montana, 
 Nominally Republican, these men, many of them the 
 paid attorneys of mining companies, are silver men 
 first, second, and always. It is true that they have 
 voted for Protection before, but then they were bar 
 tering their voices against Republican encouragement 
 for bimetallism. That game is up now ; he who is not 
 for silver is against it. It remains to be seen whether 
 the Protectionism of these gentlemen will be as ready 
 to the empty hand as it was when the hand paid cash, 
 or at least promissory notes, for goods delivered. 
 
 But the coining President, by patronage and diplo 
 matic arts, hopes to evade this obstacle. Even if he 
 fails and the silver corporations are not children to 
 be cajoled with lollipops it is only a case of wait 
 ing a year or two. With a handsome Republican 
 majority in most of the State legislatures, the satis 
 factory leavening of the Senate with Protection needs 
 only time. As for the Gold Democrats, Mr M Kinley 
 may owe them much, but he owes the industrial mag 
 nates of his own party a great deal more. Theirs will 
 be ever the most potent voice in his ear, and it will 
 be ever suggestive of Protection. Mr Hanna alone, as 
 the personal payment of his cool and unerring conduct 
 of the campaign, might fairly claim a duty on coal. 
 But besides Mr Hanna there are hundreds of wealthy 
 individuals and corporations that have almost the 
 
LOOKING FORWARD. 301 
 
 right at any rate in the American code of political 
 ethics to demand a protective policy in return for 
 what they have done to secure this election. A cam 
 paign of education, even though it never outstep the 
 bounds of the most legitimate influences, demands 
 vast resources to buy speakers, literature, special 
 trains, and the like. Without the funds supplied 
 by these men and bodies, the campaign just over 
 could never have been fought. Their dollars won it. 
 They paid the piper; they will call the tune. 
 
 If we wish to look beyond 1900 down the vista of 
 the twentieth century, there is doubtless light to be 
 derived from the election of 1896. Doubtless there 
 is more light than has been thrown by any of the 
 more recent elections, for at least two of the questions 
 that are likely to exert a controlling influence on the 
 remote fortunes of the United States have this year 
 been seen in germ. These two dangers for dangers 
 they are, and some day may be very grave ones 
 arise respectively out of the opposition of distinct 
 localities and of distinct classes. 
 
 Many people have said that the United States 
 are too large to exist permanently as one nation. 
 Probably it would be at least as true a statement 
 of the situation to say that their commercial interests 
 are too diverse, and that the whole nation is too 
 intently concentrated on the commercial to the ex 
 clusion of other influences which might keep tln> 
 country together. No doubt distance has a good deal 
 
302 THE OUTLOOK. 
 
 to do with it. Distance does not necessarily beget 
 antagonism, but it deadens understanding and sym 
 pathy. Hence there grows up a feeling between 
 localities let us say the big cities of the East and 
 the mining camps of the Rocky Mountains analogous 
 to the feeling that the United States entertain to 
 wards ourselves. It is not hostility, but it is a kind 
 of latent ill-will, sedulously fostered, which is the 
 raw material of hostility. There is no apparent 
 reason for it, unless it be jealousy and a kind of 
 half-voiced resentment of the fact that people who 
 are so alike in most points, and ought to be so near, 
 are unlike in some points, and dwell so far apart. 
 
 Besides this vague dislike which comes of distance, 
 the somewhat emulous and self-conscious character of 
 the American fosters jealousies between States and 
 cities which sometimes become almost hatreds. Each 
 city sub-consciously selects the rival nearest it in size 
 and strength to vie with it and to detest it. A man 
 from New York and a man from Chicago, a man from 
 San Francisco and a man from St Louis, can hardly 
 meet without squabbling over the respective lordliness 
 of their homes. St Paul and Minneapolis, living on 
 exactly opposite sides of the Mississippi, are said to be 
 the bitterest rivals of all. This rivalry has its stimu 
 lating side, and the stimulus is very beneficent. But 
 behind it there remains the fact that the West and 
 South, broadly speaking, produce raw material, while 
 the North-East manufactures and exchanges it. At 
 
A PHANTOM OF DANGER. 303 
 
 long as business is good this fact does no harm. 
 Indeed, as I have said, the business relations between 
 buyer and seller, reseller and buyer-back-again, are a 
 powerful clamp to keep the country together. It is 
 when the commercial interests of the two tracts clash, 
 or appear to clash, that danger is in the air. This 
 year for the first time the two sides stood embattled 
 on a direct commercial issue. The rise in wheat and 
 the general pick-me-up dealt round to all business by 
 Mr M Kinley s victory have somewhat smoothed the 
 defeat for West and South. Should there come a day 
 when the gain of the one part of the country means 
 the dead unrelieved loss of the other, that day the 
 United States will be on the edge of very deep peril. 
 
 But for myself I do not see how this day is to 
 come. In the United States themselves men have 
 mocked at the prediction throughout, and the event, 
 this time at any rate, has proved them right. In 
 truth there is no solid West, and no prospect of it. 
 To suppose that the West is seriously banded against 
 the East on the silver question or any other is a com 
 plete delusion. The election returns dispel it in a 
 moment. Mr Bryan carried most of the States West 
 of the Mississippi, it is true. But he did not carry 
 Iowa, Minnesota, North Dakota, California, or Ore 
 gon. In South Dakota, his own Nebraska, Kansas, 
 Wyoming, and Washington, his majorities were small. 
 Now, a country so evenly divided can never enter 
 with effect upon a civil war. Furthermore, the com- 
 
304 THE OUTLOOK. 
 
 mercial relations between the two halves of the 
 country, the East supplying manufactures, the West 
 food-stuffs, forbid any such internecine madness. If 
 there was no hint of a fight this time, when the 
 monetary interests of the two seemed diametrically 
 opposed, there is not likely to be next time, nor any 
 time in the immediate future. 
 
 There remain the forces of anarchy. Ever since 
 the bomb-throwing in Chicago seven or eight years 
 ago, the United States, like Continental nations, have 
 rather lost their heads on the subject of Anarchism. 
 They see Anarchists behind every bush. For instance, 
 Mr Altgeld is labelled Anarchist because, as Governor 
 of Illinois, he pardoned certain not especially heinous 
 Anarchists who had already spent several of the best 
 years of their lives in Joliet jail. You might as well 
 call Sir Matthew White Ridley dynamiter because he 
 let out Dr Gallagher. It is probably true that what 
 were called the anarchistic features of the Chicago 
 platform the attacks on Federal intervention in 
 State affairs and upon the Supreme Court were due 
 to the personal spite of Governor Altgeld, who had 
 come into collision with the central Government 
 more than once. But people should have seen that 
 this fact made them less, and not more, portentous ; 
 they were in their origin petty and ridiculous, and 
 in effect they did the Chicago platform infinitely more 
 harm than good. 
 
 They were meant to reinforce the lukewarm silver 
 
AMERICAN INDIVIDUALISM. 305 
 
 sentiment in the working man of the East. Thuy 
 signally failed. The party of hunger needs to be 
 offered stronger food than vague constitutional changes, 
 which hold out no prospect of bread-and-butter to 
 anybody. Yet on the side of labour, as against capi 
 tal, the Eastern working man is certainly open to 
 incitement. Some other time the form of appeal 
 against capital may be better chosen, and will not 
 fail. Americans have complained that this is the 
 first election in which class has been arrayed against 
 class; it will assuredly not be the last. Open war 
 fare between capital and labour will be earlier and 
 bitterer in the United States than in Europe, for the 
 sufficient reason that legal organisation of industry 
 has been left wholly wanting. Little is done by the 
 State; all is left to the initiative of the individual. 
 The owner of a plot of ground in New York or 
 Chicago can put up a building of twenty storeys, if 
 he has the mind and the capital, without troubling 
 himself either about his neighbours ancient lights or 
 the width of the street. The apparent negligence is 
 explained partly by the Americans horror of retard 
 ing mechanical progress, and partly by their reliance 
 on competition. They have cast overboard the law 
 as the safeguard of individual right, and put them 
 selves under the protection of competition, and of it 
 alone. Now, a trust, in its exacter acceptation, is 
 the flat negation of competition. It is a combination 
 of all the producers of a necessary article to regulate 
 
 u 
 
306 THE OUTLOOK. 
 
 r 
 
 its price to their own profit and the loss of the public. 
 And there are far more unlikely things than that the 
 battle-cry of the next election will be, Death to the 
 trusts ! 
 
 Newspapers may exaggerate the extent to which 
 trusts are able to control the prices of the necessities 
 of life. Absolute control of supply is probably rare ; 
 coalitions among leading producers strong enough to 
 set the tune to the market are as probably very com 
 mon. Be that so or not, it is certain that commercial 
 concerns make frequent, powerful, and successful com 
 binations to override the public interest. One of the 
 most odious forms of this is a combination among 
 great employers of labour railway companies and 
 the like to keep a mutual black list. If a working 
 man offends one of them, in time of strike or other 
 wise, he will get no employment from any. Men 
 have changed their names and disguised themselves in 
 vain to escape this omniscient and merciless boycott. 
 But all such corporations are left unfettered in a way 
 that to an Englishman appears almost a return to 
 savagery. The defencelessness of individual liberty 
 against the encroachments of railway companies, tram 
 way companies, nuisance - committing manure com 
 panies, and the like, is little less than horrible. You 
 are as much at their mercy as in Germany you are at 
 the mercy of the Government. Where regulating 
 Acts are proposed, the companies unite to oppose 
 them ; where such Acts exist, they bribe corrupt offi- 
 
THE VIOLENCE OF LABOUR. 307 
 
 cials to ignore them. When they want any Act for 
 themselves, it can always be bought for cash. They 
 maintain their own members in legislative bodies 
 pocket assemblymen, pocket representatives, pocket 
 senators. In the name of individual freedom and in 
 dustrial progress they are become the tyrants of the 
 whole community. 
 
 On the other hand, labour, though most enviably 
 well off, judged by any European standard, is becom 
 ing increasingly discontented and violent. It is be 
 coming rare now to find a strike in which gunpowder 
 and dynamite are not the ultimate appeal. Lawless 
 greed on the one side and lawless brutality on the 
 other the outlook frowns. On the wisdom of the 
 rulers of the country in salving or embittering these 
 antagonisms still more, on the fortune of the people 
 in either modifying or hardening their present convic 
 tion that to get dollars is the one end of life it de 
 pends whether the future of the United States is to be 
 of eminent beneficence or unspeakable disaster. It 
 may stretch out the light of liberty to the whole 
 world. It may become the Devil s drill-ground, where 
 the cohorts of anarchy will furbish themselves against 
 the social Armageddon. It rests with themselves. 
 
308 
 
 XXXIII. 
 
 THE AMERICAN. 
 
 LONDON, November 12. 
 
 THE proudest moment of my fifteen thousand miles of 
 wandering came upon me in a bank in Chicago. As 
 I was waiting there the policeman on duty approached 
 me stealthily, as one about to confide a secret of deep 
 importance. 
 
 " Are ye not an Englishman, sorr ? " he whispered. 
 
 "Yes," I said. 
 
 "I knew ut," he responded with enthusiasm. "I 
 knew ut the minute ye came through the dure. There 
 is nothing like ut in the worrld." 
 
 Howbeit, there is something very strangely like it, 
 and at the same time most strangely unlike. That 
 is the American. He does not look like an English 
 man, yet it is manifest at sight that he cannot be 
 of any other known breed of man. He talks Eng 
 lish often as if he were trying to imitate Mr 
 Eugene Stratton, often with a clarity of pronuncia 
 tion that put me again and again to shame. When 
 
A NEW TEMPERAMENT. 309 
 
 I was dictating to a typewriter and she could not 
 understand what I said, when at last she caught 
 the word and repeated it, I wondered why I could 
 not make a vowel sound with the same distinctness 
 and purity. Yet that typewriter could not spell ; for 
 the Americans, as I have hinted, are a nation of but 
 superficial education. 
 
 But the essential difference which new environment 
 has grafted into the English stock strikes deeper than 
 appearance and language. If I am asked to give it 
 a name, it is hard to find one. The American is a 
 highly electric Anglo-Saxon. His temperament is of 
 quicksilver. There is as much di (Terence in vivacity 
 and emotion between him and an Englishman as there 
 is between an Englishman and an Italian. Yet curi 
 ously there is just as much difference between him 
 and the Italian. His emotion is not the least like 
 that of the Southern European. For behind the flash 
 of his passion there shines always the steady light of 
 dry, hard, practical reason. Shrewd yet excitable, 
 hot-hearted and cool-headed, he combines the north 
 ern and the southern temperaments, and yet is utterly 
 distinct from either. He has developed into a new 
 sort of Anglo-Saxon, a new national character, a new 
 race. 
 
 The keynote of this character is its irresistible im 
 pulse to impress all its sentiments externally by the 
 crudest and most obvious medium. The Americans 
 are the most demonstrative of all the peoples of the 
 
310 THE AMERICAN. 
 
 earth. Everything must be brought to the surface, 
 embodied in a visible, palpable form. For a fact 
 to make any effect on the American mind it must 
 be put in a shape where it can be seen, heard, 
 handled. If you want to impress your fellows you 
 must do it not through their reasoning powers, but- 
 through the five senses of their bodies. 
 
 I noticed it first in connection with their way of 
 conducting an election. A hundred thousand men 
 are going to vote for M Kinley; that is nothing. 
 Put your hundred thousand men down in Broad 
 way, so that we can see them marching, hear them 
 shouting; then we will begin to appreciate the fact. 
 4.nd the more you give us to see and hear in the 
 way of banners and bands, the more we shall ap 
 preciate it. The demonstrative nature of the race, 
 once discovered in this respect, soon appeared a 
 master-key which would unlock most of the puzzles 
 in the American. The most patriotic of men, his 
 patriotism seems always to centre rather on his flag 
 than on his country : he can see the flag, but he 
 can t see the country. Why does he cover his per 
 son with childish buttons and badges ? Because you 
 can see them, and you can t see the sentiments in 
 his mind. Why does he cling all his life to the title 
 of some rank or office he held twenty years ago ? 
 You can hear the title pronounced, but you can t 
 see the history of his life. A man s self is no good 
 unless. h can put a, big legible label on it. Thus, 
 
THE ACCUSING BONE. 311 
 
 ngain, they will not intrust their goods to anybody 
 without receiving a check something you can see 
 and jingle in your pocket. They do not read Shake 
 speare, but would think it almost a sin to visit 
 England without seeing Shakespeare s house. In 
 business they are the most unwearied and ingenious 
 advertisers in the world. In dress they appear vain, 
 out of just the same reverence for the concrete and 
 indifference to the abstract. No nation in the world 
 is in such bondage to fashion as democratic America. 
 Her men and women, young and old, wear boots that 
 narrow to a sharp point, like skates, two inches 
 beyond the toes; they tinker at their faces with 
 complexion-washes and nose-machines as zealously 
 as some people in England tinker at their souls. But 
 the extremest case I met of the appeal to the concrete 
 was a lawsuit in which parents claimed damages for 
 an assault on their child. A kick had brought on 
 necrosis of the bone, and the necrosised bone was 
 duly produced in court and handed round among the 
 jury. That settled it. There was plenty of medical 
 evidence as to the cause of death, but all this 
 weighed as nothing to the sight and feel of the 
 accusing bone. 
 
 It is in this sense that the Americans may fairly 
 be called the most materialistic people of the world. 
 Materialistic in the sense of being avaricious, I do 
 not think they are : they make money, as I have 
 said, because they must make something, and there 
 
312 THE AMERICAN. 
 
 is nothing else to make. But materialistic, in th& 
 sense that they must have all their ideas put in 
 material form, they unquestionably are. 
 
 Another characteristic which may perhaps be partly 
 explained on the same theory, is the American want 
 of thoroughness. Whether in building a railway or 
 in tilling a field, in enforcing a law or in keeping 
 an appointment, they are less thorough than we. 
 Everything is left, to the English mind, half finished. 
 Perhaps one reason is that a certain amount has 
 been done ; there is something to show ; the instinct 
 of display is gratified. Without waiting to perfect 
 the details that make no show, the American turns 
 to attain palpable and striking results elsewhere. 
 This may not be the whole explanation. There is 
 also the roving temperament innate in the emigrant s 
 children. Still more to the point is the very wise and 
 practical turn which forbids wasting further effort 
 on what will serve its purpose as it is. This virtue 
 they have most eminently : except for little foibles 
 born of the desire for outward effect, they are most 
 free from pedantry. If the American is less doggedly 
 resolute and persevering than the Englishman, he 
 is proportionately more irresistible and ingenious in 
 devising possible means to attain any impossible end. 
 
 To pass from the manufactory, and the farm, and 
 the mine, into the home, it is believed by people in 
 this country that the American still preserves the 
 private life of the Puritan, from whom, in some not 
 
NOT PURITANICAL. 313 
 
 unexaggerated measure, he descends. But there is a 
 good deal of misapprehension about this. As to the 
 home, the Americans talk about it a great deal. A 
 man never builds himself a house: he builds himself 
 a home. But you cannot call a people who will never 
 be happy ten years in the same place, who build them 
 selves houses with the view of shortly moving them 
 bodily somewhere else, who often voluntarily live in 
 public and comfortless hotels you cannot call them 
 home-loving in the English sense. As to Puritanism, 
 people point to their irreproachable novels. Yes, but 
 look at their disreputable newspapers. They will 
 refuse to call legs anything but limbs, yet they will 
 readily produce generous pictures of those limbs in 
 tights. There is no need to go into the evidence, but 
 I am satisfied that in point of morality the Americans 
 are neither more nor less puritanical than ourselves. 
 And the facts that they are the hardiest of gamblers 
 and the most ingenious of blasphemers, though far 
 from utterly damning, are hardly evidence of direct 
 spiritual descent Irorn the Puritans. Still less is the 
 more important fact that, while often hide-bound by 
 convention, America is magnificently free from in 
 tolerance. 
 
 In one virtue these men furnish a shining example 
 to all the world in their devoted chivalry towards 
 their women. They toil and slave, they kill them 
 selves at forty, that their women may live in luxury 
 and become socially and intellectually superior to 
 
314 THE AMERICAN. 
 
 themselves. They do it without even an idea that 
 there is any self-sacrifice in it. Whether it is good 
 for the women might be doubted, but it is unspeak 
 ably noble and honouring to the men. The age of 
 chivalry is not gone ; until America it never came. 
 
 On the other side of the picture is the American 
 attitude to children and to the old. With children 
 they are merely foolishly indulgent, thus producing an 
 undisciplined, conceited, and ignorant youth. No 
 American is fit to talk to until he is thirty, and he re 
 tains all his life a want of discipline, an incapacity for 
 ordered and corporate effort. The individual may be 
 the fresher and the stronger for it, but it is not pro 
 ductive of good government. With the old the accusa 
 tion is graver ; they are shouldered unmercifully out of 
 existence. It would be impossible in America to find 
 a newspaper correspondence like one which appeared 
 in the Daily Mail upon " reasonable correction " of 
 wives. But I found in New York a correspondence 
 on the open question whether the old have any right 
 to respect. Many of the public thought, quite serious 
 ly, they had no right even to existence. Why, it was 
 asked, should those who had spent their lives in self- 
 indulgence (that is, who had not saved money) pre 
 sume to stand in the way of the self-denying (or 
 money-making) ? Away with them ! Now that would 
 be impossible in England. 
 
 One explanation is that virtually there are no old 
 in America at all. The strenuous fever of life kills 
 
IS HE DYING OUT? 315 
 
 the American at fifty or so. An American woman is 
 old at thirty. And certainly the climate helps. It is 
 not yet certain that North America is not the dead 
 liest white man s grave in the world. For the old 
 families die out; the native-born population at the 
 last census had not increased, but had heavily de 
 creased. Maybe the climate is a man-killing one ; the 
 French-Canadians breed prodigiously, but it appears 
 from remains that the country never carried a popu 
 lation comparable to many areas of the Old World. 
 Partly it may be that the nervous unrest of life in the 
 States is antagonistic to the begetting of children ; 
 partly it is the deliberate refusal of pampered women 
 to assume the responsibilities of motherhood. Both 
 these dangers are real ones. From whatever cause, the 
 old element, the English element, the natural leaders 
 of the country, are dying out, and the vacancies are 
 filled by contributions from every nation of the earth. 
 Will they blend ? Will these tributaries of new blood 
 turn the stream of national character into another 
 channel? It is too early to say. 
 
 It is entirely to be hoped not, for the character of 
 the present American is not one to be lightly lost from 
 the world. His worst fault is that he dislikes us. 
 But that though it sound a paradox is because he 
 respects us. Entirely free from personal self-con 
 sciousness, the Americans are nationally most self- 
 conscious ; they resent the existence of a nation they 
 are bound to respect. But that will go with time. 
 
316 THE AMERICAN. 
 
 Meanwhile the American may make his mind easy 
 about his country. It is a credit to hirn, and he is a 
 credit to it. You may differ from him, you may laugh 
 at him ; but neither of these is the predominant 
 emotion he inspires. Even while you differ or laugh, 
 he is essentially the man with whom you are alwayi 
 wanting to shake hands. 
 
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