James Fullarton Muirhead - The Land of Contrasts

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The
Land of Contrasts

_A Briton's View of his American Kin_

By

James Fullarton Muirhead

Author of _Baedeker's Handbooks to Great Britain
and the United States_

Lamson, Wolffe and Company
Boston, New York and London
_MDCCCXCVIII._

Copyright, 1898
By Lamson, Wolffe and Company
_All rights reserved_

Press of
Rockwell and Churchill
BOSTON, U.S.A.

_To
The Land
That has given me
What makes Life most worth living_

Contents

Chapter Page

I. Introductory 1

II. The Land of Contrasts 7

III. Lights and Shadows of American Society 24

IV. An Appreciation of the American Woman 45

V. The American Child 63

VI. International Misapprehensions and National Differences 74

VII. Sports and Amusements 106

VIII. The Humour of the "Man on the Cars" 128

IX. American Journalism--A Mixed Blessing 143

X. Some Literary Straws 162

XI. Certain Features of Certain Cities 190

XII. Baedekeriana 219

XIII. The American Note 273

Author's Note

My first visit to the United States of America--a short one--was paid
in 1888. The observations on which this book is mainly based were,
however, made in 1890-93, when I spent nearly three years in the
country, engaged in the preparation of "Baedeker's Handbook to the
United States." My work led me into almost every State and Territory
in the Union, and brought me into direct contact with representatives
of practically every class. The book was almost wholly written in what
leisure I could find for it in 1895 and 1896. The foot-notes, added on
my third visit to the country (1898), while I was seeing the chapters
through the press, have at least this significance, that they show how
rapidly things change in the Land of Contrasts.

No part of the book has been previously published, except some ten
pages or so, which appeared in the _Arena_ for July, 1892. Most of the
matter in this article has been incorporated in Chapter II. of the
present volume.

So far as the book has any general intention, my aim has been, while
not ignoring the defects of American civilisation, to dwell rather on
those features in which, as it seems to me, John Bull may learn from
Brother Jonathan. I certainly have not had so much trouble in finding
these features as seems to have been the case with many other British
critics of America. My sojourn in the United States has been full of
benefit and stimulus to myself; and I should like to believe that my
American readers will see that this book is substantially a tribute of
admiration and gratitude.

J.F.M.

I

Introductory

It is not everyone's business, nor would it be everyone's pleasure, to
visit the United States of America. More, perhaps, than in any other
country that I know of will what the traveller finds there depend on
what he brings with him. Preconception will easily fatten into a
perfect mammoth of realisation; but the open mind will add
immeasurably to its garner of interests and experiences. It may be
"but a colourless crowd of barren life to the dilettante--a poisonous
field of clover to the cynic" (Martin Morris); but he to whom man is
more than art will easily find his account in a visit to the American
Republic. The man whose bent of mind is distinctly conservative, to
whom innovation always suggests a presumption of deterioration, will
probably be much more irritated than interested by a peregrination of
the Union. The Englishman who is wedded to his own ideas, and whose
conception of comfort and pleasure is bounded by the way they do
things at home, may be goaded almost to madness by the gnat-stings of
American readjustments--and all the more because he cannot adopt the
explanation that they are the natural outcome of an alien blood and a
foreign tongue. If he expects the same servility from his "inferiors"
that he has been accustomed to at home, his relations with them will
be a series of electric shocks; nay, his very expectation of it will
exasperate the American and make him show his very worst side. The
stately English dame must let her amusement outweigh her resentment if
she is addressed as "grandma" by some genial railway conductor of the
West; she may feel assured that no impertinence is intended.

The lover of scenery who expects to see a Jungfrau float into his ken
before he has lost sight of a Mte. Rosa; the architect who expects to
find the railway time-table punctuated at hourly intervals by a
venerable monument of his art; the connoisseur who hopes to visit a
Pitti Palace or a Dresden Picture Gallery in every large city; the
student who counts on finding almost every foot of ground soaked with
historic gore and every building hallowed by immemorial association;
the sociologist who looks for different customs, costumes, and
language at every stage of his journey;--each and all of these will do
well to refrain his foot from the soil of the United States. On the
other hand, the man who is interested in the workings of civilisation
under totally new conditions; who can make allowances, and quickly and
easily readjust his mental attitude; who has learned to let the new
comforts of a new country make up, temporarily at least, for the loss
of the old; who finds nothing alien to him that is human, and has a
genuine love for mankind; who can appreciate the growth of general
comfort at the expense of caste; who delights in promising experiments
in politics, sociology, and education; who is not thrown off his
balance by the shifting of the centre of gravity of honour and
distinction; who, in a word, is not congealed by conventionality, but
is ready to accept novelties on their merits,--he, unless I am very
grievously mistaken, will find compensations in the United States that
will go far to make up for Swiss Alp and Italian lake, for Gothic
cathedral and Palladian palace, for historic charters and
time-honoured tombs, for paintings by Raphael and statues by Phidias.

Perhaps, in the last analysis, our appreciation of America will depend
on whether we are optimistic or pessimistic in regard to the great
social problem which is formed of so many smaller problems. If we
think that the best we can do is to preserve what we have, America
will be but a series of disappointments. If, however, we believe that
man's sympathies for others will grow deeper, that his ingenuity will
ultimately be equal to at least a partial solution of the social
question, we shall watch the seething of the American crucible with
intensest interest. The solution of the social problem, speaking
broadly, must imply that each man must in some direction, simple or
complex, work for his own livelihood. Equality will always be a word
for fools and doctrinaires to conjure with, but those who believe in
man's sympathy for man must have faith that some day relative human
justice will be done, which will be as far beyond the justice of
to-day as light is from dark.[1] And it would be hard to say where we
are to look for this consummation if not in the United States of
America, which "has been the home of the poor and the eccentric from
all parts of the world, and has carried their poverty and passions on
its stalwart young shoulders." We may visit the United States, like M.
Bourget, _pour reprendre un peu de foi dans le lendemain de
civilisation_.

The paragraph on a previous page is not meant to imply that the United
States are destitute of scenic, artistic, picturesque, and historic
interest. The worst that can be said of American scenery is that its
best points are separated by long intervals; the best can hardly be
put too strongly. Places like the Yosemite Valley (of which Mr.
Emerson said that it was the only scenery he ever saw where "the
reality came up to the brag"), the Yellowstone Park, Niagara, and the
stupendous Canon of the Colorado River amply make good their worldwide
reputation; but there are innumerable other places less known in
Europe, such as the primeval woods and countless lakes of the
Adirondacks, the softer beauties of the Berkshire Hills, the Hudson
(that grander American Rhine), the Swiss-like White Mountains, the
Catskills, the mystic Ocklawaha of Florida, and the Black Mountains of
Carolina that would amply repay the easy trouble of an Atlantic
passage under modern conditions. The historic student, too, will find
much that is worthy of his attention, especially in the older Eastern
States; and will, perhaps, be surprised to realise how relative a term
antiquity is. In a short time he will find himself looking at an
American building of the seventeenth century with as much reverence as
if it had been a contemporary of the Plantagenets; and, indeed, if
antiquity is to be determined by change and development rather than by
mere flight of time, the two centuries of New York will hold their own
with a cycle of Cathay. It is, as Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes remarked
to the present writer, like the different thermometrical scales; it
does not take very long to realise that twenty-five degrees of Reaumur
mean as great a heat as ninety degrees of Fahrenheit. Such a city as
Boston amply justifies its inclusion in a "Historic Towns" series,
along with London and Oxford; and it is by no means a singular
instance. Even the lover of art will not find America an absolute
Sahara. To say nothing of the many masterpieces of European painters
that have found a resting-place in America, where there is at least
one public picture gallery and several private ones of the first
class, the best efforts of American painters, and perhaps still more
those of American sculptors, are full of suggestion and charm; while I
cannot believe that the student of modern architecture will anywhere
find a more interesting field than among the enterprising and original
works of the American school of architecture.

This book will be grievously misunderstood if it is supposed to be in
any way an attempt to cover, even sketchily, the whole ground of
American civilisation, or to give anything like a coherent
appreciation of it. In the main it is merely a record of personal
impressions, a series of notes upon matters which happened to come
under my personal observation and to excite my personal interest. Not
only the conditions under which I visited the country, but also my own
disqualifications of taste and knowledge, have prevented me from more
than touching on countless topics, such as the phenomena of politics,
religion, commerce, and industry, which would naturally find a place
in any complete account of America. I have also tried to avoid, so far
as possible, describing well-known scenery, or in other ways going
over the tracks of my predecessors. The phenomena of the United States
are so momentous in themselves that the observation of them from any
new standpoint cannot be wholly destitute of value; while they change
so rapidly that he would be unobservant indeed who could not find
something new to chronicle.

It is important, also, to remember that the generalisations of this
book apply in very few cases to the whole extent of the United States.
I shall be quite contented if any one section of the country thinks
that I cannot mean _it_ in such-and-such an assertion, provided it
allows that the cap fits some other portion of the great community. As
a rule, however, it may be assumed that unqualified references to
American civilisation relate to it as crystallised in such older
communities as New York or Philadelphia, not to the fermenting process
of life-in-the-making on the frontier.

In the comparisons between Great Britain and the United States I have
tried to oppose only those classes which substantially correspond to
each other. Thus, in contrasting the Lowell manufacturer, the
Hampshire squire, the Virginian planter, and the Manchester man, it
must not be forgotten that the first and the last have many points of
difference from the second and third which are not due to their
geographical position. Many of the instances on which my remarks are
based may undoubtedly be called _extreme_; but even extreme cases are
suggestive, if not exactly typical. There is a breed of poultry in
Japan, in which, by careful cultivation, the tail-feathers of the cock
sometimes reach a length of ten or even fifteen feet. This is not
precisely typical of the gallinaceous species; but it is none the less
a phenomenon which might be mentioned in a comparison with the
apteryx.

Finally, I ought perhaps to say, with Mr. E.A. Freeman, that I
sometimes find it almost impossible to believe that the whole nation
can be so good as the people who have been so good to me.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] I have some suspicion that this ought to be in quotation marks,
but cannot now trace the passage.

II

The Land of Contrasts

When I first thought of writing about the United States at all, I soon
came to the conclusion that no title could better than the above
express the general impression left on my mind by my experiences in
the Great Republic. It may well be that a long list of inconsistencies
might be made out for any country, just as for any individual; but so
far as my knowledge goes the United States stands out as preeminently
the "Land of Contrasts"--the land of stark, staring, and stimulating
inconsistency; at once the home of enlightenment and the happy hunting
ground of the charlatan and the quack; a land in which nothing happens
but the unexpected; the home of Hyperion, but no less the haunt of the
satyr; always the land of promise, but not invariably the land of
performance; a land which may be bounded by the aurora borealis, but
which has also undeniable acquaintance with the flames of the
bottomless pit; a land which is laved at once by the rivers of
Paradise and the leaden waters of Acheron.

If I proceed to enumerate a few of the actual contrasts that struck
me, in matters both weighty and trivial, it is not merely as an
exercise in antithesis, but because I hope it will show how easy it
would be to pass an entirely and even ridiculously untrue judgment
upon the United States by having an eye only for one series of the
startling opposites. It should show in a very concrete way one of the
most fertile sources of those unfair international judgments which led
the French Academician Jouey to the statement: "Plus on reflechit et
plus on observe, plus on se convainct de la faussete de la plupart de
ces jugements portes sur un nation entiere par quelques ecrivains et
adoptes sans examen par les autres." The Americans themselves can
hardly take umbrage at the label, if Mr. Howells truly represents them
when he makes one of the characters in "A Traveller from Altruria"
assert that they pride themselves even on the size of their
inconsistencies. The extraordinary clashes that occur in the United
States are doubtless largely due to the extraordinary mixture of youth
and age in the character of the country. If ever an old head was set
upon young shoulders, it was in this case of the United States--this
"Strange New World, thet yit was never young." While it is easy, in a
study of the United States, to see the essential truth of the analogy
between the youth of an individual and the youth of a State, we must
also remember that America was in many respects born full-grown, like
Athena from the brain of Zeus, and cooerdinates in the most
extraordinary way the shrewdness of the sage with the naivete of the
child. Those who criticise the United States because, with the
experience of all the ages behind her, she is in some points vastly
defective as compared with the nations of Europe are as much mistaken
as those who look to her for the fresh ingenuousness of youth unmarred
by any trace of age's weakness. It is simply inevitable that she
should share the vices as well as the virtues of both. Mr. Freeman
has well pointed out how natural it is that a colony should rush ahead
of the mother country in some things and lag behind it in others; and
that just as you have to go to French Canada if you want to see Old
France, so, for many things, if you wish to see Old England you must
go to New England.

Thus America may easily be abreast or ahead of us in such matters as
the latest applications of electricity, while retaining in its legal
uses certain cumbersome devices that we have long since discarded.
Americans still have "Courts of Oyer and Terminer" and still insist on
the unanimity of the jury, though their judges wear no robes and their
counsel apply to the cuspidor as often as to the code. So, too, the
extension of municipal powers accomplished in Great Britain still
seems a formidable innovation in the United States.

The general feeling of power and scope is probably another fruitful
source of the inconsistencies of American life. Emerson has well said
that consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds; and no doubt the
largeness, the illimitable outlook, of the national mind of the United
States makes it disregard surface discrepancies that would grate
horribly on a more conventional community. The confident belief that
all will come out right in the end, and that harmony can be attained
when time is taken to consider it, carries one triumphantly over the
roughest places of inconsistency. It is easy to drink our champagne
from tin cans, when we know that it is merely a sense of hurry that
prevents us fetching the chased silver goblets waiting for our use.

This, I fancy, is the explanation of one series of contrasts which
strikes an Englishman at once. America claims to be the land of
liberty _par excellence_, and in a wholesale way this may be true in
spite of the gap between the noble sentiments of the Declaration of
Independence and the actual treatment of the negro and the Chinaman.
But in what may be called the retail traffic of life the American puts
up with innumerable restrictions of his personal liberty. Max O'Rell
has expatiated with scarcely an exaggeration on the wondrous sight of
a powerful millionaire standing meekly at the door of a hotel
dining-room until the consequential head-waiter (very possibly a
coloured gentleman) condescends to point out to him the seat he may
occupy. So, too, such petty officials as policemen and railway
conductors are generally treated rather as the masters than as the
servants of the public. The ordinary American citizen accepts a long
delay on the railway or an interminable "wait" at the theatre as a
direct visitation of Providence, against which it would be useless
folly to direct cat-calls, grumbles, or letters to the _Times_.
Americans invented the slang word "kicker," but so far as I could see
their vocabulary is here miles ahead of their practice; they dream
noble deeds, but do not do them; Englishmen "kick" much better,
without having a name for it. The right of the individual to do as he
will is respected to such an extent that an entire company will put up
with inconvenience rather than infringe it. A coal-carter will calmly
keep a tramway-car waiting several minutes until he finishes his
unloading. The conduct of the train-boy, as described in Chapter XII.,
would infallibly lead to assault and battery in England, but hardly
elicits an objurgation in America, where the right of one sinner to
bang a door outweighs the desire of twenty just persons for a quiet
nap. On the other hand, the old Puritan spirit of interference with
individual liberty sometimes crops out in America in a way that would
be impossible in this country. An inscription in one of the large
mills at Lawrence, Mass., informs the employees (or did so some years
ago) that "regular attendance at some place of worship and a proper
observance of the Sabbath will be expected of every person employed."
So, too, the young women of certain districts impose on their admirers
such restrictions in the use of liquor and tobacco that any less
patient animal than the native American would infallibly kick over the
traces.

In spite of their acknowledged nervous energy and excitability,
Americans often show a good deal of a quality that rivals the phlegm
of the Dutch. Their above-mentioned patience during railway or other
delays is an instance of this. So, in the incident related in Chapter
XII. the passengers in the inside coach retained their seats
throughout the whole experiment. Their resemblance in such cases as
this to placid domestic kine is enhanced--out West--by the inevitable
champing of tobacco or chewing-gum, than which nothing I know of so
robs the human countenance of the divine spark of intelligence. Boston
men of business, after being whisked by the electric car from their
suburban residences to the city at the rate of twelve miles an hour,
sit stoically still while the congested traffic makes the car take
twenty minutes to pass the most crowded section of Washington
street,--a walk of barely five minutes.[2]

Even in the matter of what Mr. Ambassador Bayard has styled "that form
of Socialism, Protection," it seems to me that we can find traces of
this contradictory tendency. Americans consider their country as
emphatically the land of protection, and attribute most of their
prosperity to their inhospitable customs barriers. This may be so; but
where else in the world will you find such a volume and expanse of
free trade as in these same United States? We find here a huge section
of the world's surface, 3,000 miles long and 1,500 miles wide,
occupied by about fifty practically independent States, containing
seventy millions of inhabitants, producing a very large proportion of
all the necessities and many of the luxuries of life, and all enjoying
the freest of free trade with each other. Few of these States are as
small as Great Britain, and many of them are immensely larger.
Collectively they contain nearly half the railway mileage of the
globe, besides an incomparable series of inland waterways. Over all
these is continually passing an immense amount of goods. The San
Francisco _News Letter_, a well-known weekly journal, points out that
of the 1,400,000,000 tons of goods carried for 100 miles or upwards on
the railways of the world in 1895, no less than 800,000,000 were
carried in the United States. Even if we add the 140,000,000 carried
by sea-going ships, there remains a balance of 60,000,000 tons in
favor of the United States as against the rest of the world. It is,
perhaps, impossible to ascertain whether or not the actual value of
the goods carried would be in the same proportion; but it seems
probable that the value of the 800,000,000 tons of the home trade of
America must considerably exceed that of the _free_ portion of the
trade of the British Empire, _i.e._, practically the whole of its
import trade and that portion of its export trade carried on with
free-trade countries or colonies. The internal commerce of the United
States makes it the most wonderful market on the globe; and Brother
Jonathan, the rampant Protectionist, stands convicted as the greatest
Cobdenite of them all!

We are all, it is said, apt to "slip up" on our strongest points.
Perhaps this is why one of the leading writers of the American
democracy is able to assert that "there is no country in the world
where the separation of the classes is so absolute as ours," and to
quote a Russian revolutionist, who lived in exile all over Europe and
nowhere found such want of sympathy between the rich and poor as in
America. If this were true it would certainly form a startling
contrast to the general kind-heartedness of the American. But I fancy
it rather points to the condition of greater relative equality. Our
Russian friend was accustomed to the patronising kindness of the
superior to the inferior, of the master to the servant. It is easy, on
an empyrean rock, to be "kind" to the mortals toiling helplessly down
below. It costs little, to use Mr. Bellamy's parable, for those
securely seated on the top of the coach to subscribe for salve to
alleviate the chafed wounds of those who drag it. In America there is
less need and less use of this patronising kindness; there is less
kindness from class to class simply because the conscious realisation
of "class" is non-existent in thousands of cases where it would be to
the fore in Europe. As for the first statement quoted at the head of
this paragraph, I find it very hard of belief. It is true that there
are exclusive _circles_, to which, for instance, Buffalo Bill would
not have the entree, but the principle of exclusion is on the whole
analogous to that by which we select our intimate personal friends. No
man in America, who is personally fitted to adorn it, need feel that
he is _automatically_ shut out (as he might well be in England) from a
really congenial social sphere.

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