never seen so many white people together, and never such a collection of
miserables. There was no color in the street and no beauty--only a maze
of wire ropes overhead and dirty stone flagging under foot.
A cab-driver volunteered to show me the glory of the town for so much
an hour, and with him I wandered far. He conceived that all this turmoil
and squash was a thing to be reverently admired, that it was good to
huddle men together in fifteen layers, one atop of the other, and to dig
holes in the ground for offices.
He said that Chicago was a live town, and that all the creatures
hurrying by me were engaged in business. That is to say they were trying
to make some money that they might not die through lack of food to put
into their bellies. He took me to canals as black as ink, and filled
with un-told abominations, and bid me watch the stream of traffic across
the bridges.
He then took me into a saloon, and while I drank made me note that the
floor was covered with coins sunk in cement. A Hottentot would not have
been guilty of this sort of barbarism. The coins made an effect pretty
enough, but the man who put them there had no thought of beauty, and,
therefore, he was a savage.
Then my cab-driver showed me business blocks gay with signs and studded
with fantastic and absurd advertisements of goods, and looking down the
long street so adorned, it was as though each vender stood at his door
howling:--“For the sake of my money, employ or buy of me, and me only!”
Have you ever seen a crowd at a famine-relief distribution? You know
then how the men leap into the air, stretching out their arms above the
crowd in the hope of being seen, while the women dolorously slap the
stomachs of their children and whimper. I had sooner watch famine relief
than the white man engaged in what he calls legitimate competition. The
one I understand. The other makes me ill.
And the cabman said that these things were the proof of progress, and
by that I knew he had been reading his newspaper, as every intelligent
American should. The papers tell their clientele in language fitted to
their comprehension that the snarling together of telegraph-wires, the
heaving up of houses, and the making of money is progress.
I spent ten hours in that huge wilderness, wandering through scores of
miles of these terrible streets and jostling some few hundred thousand
of these terrible people who talked paisa bat through their noses.
The cabman left me; but after awhile I picked up another man, who was
full of figures, and into my ears he poured them as occasion required or
the big blank factories suggested. Here they turned out so many hundred
thousand dollars' worth of such and such an article; there so many
million other things; this house was worth so many million dollars;
that one so many million, more or less. It was like listening to a child
babbling of its hoard of shells. It was like watching a fool playing
with buttons. But I was expected to do more than listen or watch.
He demanded that I should admire; and the utmost that I could say
was:--“Are these things so? Then I am very sorry for you.”
That made him angry, and he said that insular envy made me unresponsive.
So, you see, I could not make him understand.
About four and a half hours after Adam was turned out of the Garden of
Eden he felt hungry, and so, bidding Eve take care that her head was not
broken by the descending fruit, shinned up a cocoanut-palm. That hurt
his legs, cut his breast, and made him breathe heavily, and Eve was
tormented with fear lest her lord should miss his footing, and so bring
the tragedy of this world to an end ere the curtain had fairly risen.
Had I met Adam then, I should have been sorry for him. To-day I find
eleven hundred thousand of his sons just as far advanced as their father
in the art of getting food, and immeasurably inferior to him in
that they think that their palm-trees lead straight to the skies.
Consequently, I am sorry in rather more than a million different ways.
In the East bread comes naturally, even to the poorest, by a little
scratching or the gift of a friend not quite so poor. In less favored
countries one is apt to forget. Then I went to bed. And that was on a
Saturday night.
Sunday brought me the queerest experiences of all--a revelation of
barbarism complete. I found a place that was officially described as a
church. It was a circus really, but that the worshippers did not know.
There were flowers all about the building, which was fitted up
with plush and stained oak and much luxury, including twisted brass
candlesticks of severest Gothic design.
To these things and a congregation of savages entered suddenly a
wonderful man, completely in the confidence of their God, whom he
treated colloquially and exploited very much as a newspaper reporter
would exploit a foreign potentate. But, unlike the newspaper reporter,
he never allowed his listeners to forget that he, and not He, was the
centre of attraction. With a voice of silver and with imagery borrowed
from the auction-room, he built up for his hearers a heaven on the lines
of the Palmer House (but with all the gilding real gold, and all
the plate-glass diamond), and set in the centre of it a loud-voiced,
argumentative, very shrewd creation that he called God. One sentence at
this point caught my delighted ear. It was apropos of some question of
the Judgment, and ran:--“No! I tell you God doesn't do business that
way.”
He was giving them a deity whom they could comprehend, and a gold
and jewelled heaven in which they could take a natural interest. He
interlarded his performance with the slang of the streets, the counter,
and the exchange, and he said that religion ought to enter into daily
life. Consequently, I presume he introduced it as daily life--his own
and the life of his friends.
Then I escaped before the blessing, desiring no benediction at such
hands. But the persons who listened seemed to enjoy themselves, and I
understood that I had met with a popular preacher.
Later on, when I had perused the sermons of a gentleman called Talmage
and some others, I perceived that I had been listening to a very mild
specimen. Yet that man, with his brutal gold and silver idols, his
hands-in-pocket, cigar-in-mouth, and hat-on-the-back-of-the-head style
of dealing with the sacred vessels, would count himself, spiritually,
quite competent to send a mission to convert the Indians.
All that Sunday I listened to people who said that the mere fact of
spiking down strips of iron to wood, and getting a steam and iron thing
to run along them was progress, that the telephone was progress, and the
net-work of wires overhead was progress. They repeated their statements
again and again.
One of them took me to their City Hall and Board of Trade works, and
pointed it out with pride. It was very ugly, but very big, and the
streets in front of it were narrow and unclean. When I saw the faces of
the men who did business in that building, I felt that there had been a
mistake in their billeting.
By the way, 'tis a consolation to feel that I am not writing to an
English audience. Then I should have to fall into feigned ecstasies over
the marvellous progress of Chicago since the days of the great fire, to
allude casually to the raising of the entire city so many feet above
the level of the lake which it faces, and generally to grovel before the
golden calf. But you, who are desperately poor, and therefore by these
standards of no ac-count, know things, will understand when I write that
they have managed to get a million of men together on flat land, and
that the bulk of these men together appear to be lower than Mahajans and
not so companionable as a Punjabi Jat after harvest.
But I don't think it was the blind hurry of the people, their argot, and
their grand ignorance of things beyond their immediate interests that
displeased me so much as a study of the daily papers of Chicago.
Imprimis, there was some sort of a dispute between New York and Chicago
as to which town should give an exhibition of products to be hereafter
holden, and through the medium of their more dignified journals the
two cities were yahooing and hi-yi-ing at each other like opposition
newsboys. They called it humor, but it sounded like something quite
different.
That was only the first trouble. The second lay in the tone of the
productions. Leading articles which include gems such as “Back of such
and such a place,” or, “We noticed, Tuesday, such an event,” or, “don't”
for “does not,” are things to be accepted with thankfulness. All that
made me want to cry was that in these papers were faithfully reproduced
all the war-cries and “back-talk” of the Palmer House bar, the slang of
the barber-shops, the mental elevation and integrity of the Pullman car
porter, the dignity of the dime museum, and the accuracy of the excited
fish-wife. I am sternly forbidden to believe that the paper educates
the public. Then I am compelled to believe that the public educate the
paper; yet suicides on the press are rare.
Just when the sense of unreality and oppression was strongest upon me,
and when I most wanted help, a man sat at my side and began to talk what
he called politics.
I had chanced to pay about six shillings for a travelling-cap worth
eighteen-pence, and he made of the fact a text for a sermon. He said
that this was a rich country, and that the people liked to pay two
hundred per cent, on the value of a thing. They could afford it. He said
that the government imposed a protective duty of from ten to seventy
per cent on foreign-made articles, and that the American manufacturer
consequently could sell his goods for a healthy sum. Thus an imported
hat would, with duty, cost two guineas. The American manufacturer would
make a hat for seventeen shillings, and sell it for one pound fifteen.
In these things, he said, lay the greatness of America and the
effeteness of England. Competition between factory and factory kept the
prices down to decent limits, but I was never to forget that this people
were a rich people, not like the pauper Continentals, and that they
enjoyed paying duties.
To my weak intellect this seemed rather like juggling with counters.
Everything that I have yet purchased costs about twice as much as it
would in England, and when native made is of inferior quality.
Moreover, since these lines were first thought of, I have visited a
gentleman who owned a factory which used to produce things. He owned the
factory still. Not a man was in it, but he was drawing a handsome income
from a syndicate of firms for keeping it closed, in order that it might
not produce things. This man said that if protection were abandoned,
a tide of pauper labor would flood the country, and as I looked at his
factory I thought how entirely better it was to have no labor of any
kind whatever rather than face so horrible a future.
Meantime, do you remember that this peculiar country enjoys paying money
for value not received? I am an alien, and for the life of me I cannot
see why six shillings should be paid for eighteen-penny caps, or eight
shillings for half-crown cigar-cases. When the country fills up to a
decently populated level a few million people who are not aliens will be
smitten with the same sort of blindness.
But my friend's assertion somehow thoroughly suited the grotesque
ferocity of Chicago.
See now and judge! In the village of Isser Jang, on the road to
Montgomery, there be four Changar women who winnow corn--some seventy
bushels a year. Beyond their hut lives Purun Dass, the money-lender, who
on good security lends as much as five thousand rupees in a year. Jowala
Singh, the smith, mends the village plows--some thirty, broken at the
share, in three hundred and sixty-five days; and Hukm Chund, who is
letter-writer and head of the little club under the travellers' tree,
generally keeps the village posted in such gossip as the barber and the
mid-wife have not yet made public property.
Chicago husks and winnows her wheat by the million bushels, a hundred
banks lend hundreds of millions of dollars in the year, and scores of
factories turn out plow-gear and machinery by steam. Scores of daily
papers do work which Hukm Chund and the barber and the midwife perform,
with due regard for public opinion, in the village of Isser Jang. So
far as manufactories go, the difference between Chicago on the lake,
and Isser Jang on the Montgomery road, is one of degree only, and not of
kind. As far as the understanding of the uses of life goes, Isser Jang,
for all its seasonal cholers, has the advantage over Chicago.
Jowala Singh knows and takes care to avoid the three or four
ghoul-haunted fields on the outskirts of the village; but he is not
urged by millions of devils to run about all day in the sun and swear
that his plowshares are the best in the Punjab; nor does Purun Dass
fly forth in an ekka more than once or twice a year, and he knows, on
a pinch, how to use the railway and the telegraph as well as any son of
Israel in Chicago. But this is absurd.
The East is not the West, and these men must continue to deal with the
machinery of life, and to call it progress. Their very preachers
dare not rebuke them. They gloss over the hunting for money and the
thrice-sharpened bitterness of Adam's curse, by saying that such things
dower a man with a larger range of thoughts and higher aspirations. They
do not say, “Free yourselves from your own slavery,” but rather, “If you
can possibly manage it, do not set quite so much store on the things of
this world.”
And they do not know what the things of this world are!
I went off to see cattle killed, by way of clearing my head, which, as
you will perceive, was getting muddled. They say every Englishman goes
to the Chicago stock-yards. You shall find them about six miles from the
city; and once having seen them, you will never forget the sight.
As far as the eye can reach stretches a town-ship of cattle-pens,
cunningly divided into blocks, so that the animals of any pen can be
speedily driven out close to an inclined timber path which leads to an
elevated covered way straddling high above the pens. These viaducts are
two-storied. On the upper story tramp the doomed cattle, stolidly
for the most part. On the lower, with a scuffling of sharp hoofs and
multitudinous yells, run the pigs, the same end being appointed for
each. Thus you will see the gangs of cattle waiting their turn--as they
wait sometimes for days; and they need not be distressed by the sight of
their fellows running about in the fear of death. All they know is that
a man on horseback causes their next-door neighbors to move by means of
a whip. Certain bars and fences are unshipped, and behold! that crowd
have gone up the mouth of a sloping tunnel and return no more.
It is different with the pigs. They shriek back the news of the exodus
to their friends, and a hundred pens skirl responsive.
It was to the pigs I first addressed myself. Selecting a viaduct which
was full of them, as I could hear, though I could not see, I marked a
sombre building whereto it ran, and went there, not unalarmed by stray
cattle who had managed to escape from their proper quarters. A pleasant
smell of brine warned me of what was coming. I entered the factory
and found it full of pork in barrels, and on another story more pork
un-barrelled, and in a huge room the halves of swine, for whose behoof
great lumps of ice were being pitched in at the window. That room was
the mortuary chamber where the pigs lay for a little while in state ere
they began their progress through such passages as kings may sometimes
travel.
Turning a corner, and not noting an overhead arrangement of greased
rail, wheel, and pulley, I ran into the arms of four eviscerated
carcasses, all pure white and of a human aspect, pushed by a man clad in
vehement red. When I leaped aside, the floor was slippery under me. Also
there was a flavor of farm-yard in my nostrils and the shouting of a
multitude in my ears. But there was no joy in that shouting. Twelve men
stood in two lines six a side. Between them and overhead ran the railway
of death that had nearly shunted me through the window. Each man carried
a knife, the sleeves of his shirt were cut off at the elbows, and from
bosom to heel he was blood-red.
Beyond this perspective was a column of steam, and beyond that was
where I worked my awe-struck way, unwilling to touch beam or wall. The
atmosphere was stifling as a night in the rains by reason of the steam
and the crowd. I climbed to the beginning of things and, perched upon a
narrow beam, overlooked very nearly all the pigs ever bred in Wisconsin.
They had just been shot out of the mouth of the viaduct and huddled
together in a large pen. Thence they were flicked persuasively, a few
at a time, into a smaller chamber, and there a man fixed tackle on their
hinder legs, so that they rose in the air, suspended from the railway of
death.
Oh! it was then they shrieked and called on their mothers, and made
promises of amendment, till the tackle-man punted them in their backs
and they slid head down into a brick-floored passage, very like a big
kitchen sink, that was blood-red. There awaited them a red man with
a knife, which he passed jauntily through their throats, and the
full-voiced shriek became a splutter, and then a fall as of heavy
tropical rain, and the red man, who was backed against the passage-wall,
you will understand, stood clear of the wildly kicking hoofs and passed
his hand over his eyes, not from any feeling of compassion, but because
the spurted blood was in his eyes, and he had barely time to stick the
next arrival. Then that first stuck swine dropped, still kicking, into
a great vat of boiling water, and spoke no more words, but wallowed
in obedience to some unseen machinery, and presently came forth at
the lower end of the vat, and was heaved on the blades of a blunt
paddle-wheel, things which said “Hough, hough, hough!” and skelped all
the hair off him, except what little a couple of men with knives could
remove.
Then he was again hitched by the heels to that said railway, and passed
down the line of the twelve men, each man with a knife--losing with each
man a certain amount of his individuality, which was taken away in a
wheel-barrow, and when he reached the last man he was very beautiful
to behold, but excessively unstuffed and limp. Preponderance of
individuality was ever a bar to foreign travel. That pig could have been
in case to visit you in India had he not parted with some of his most
cherished notions.
The dissecting part impressed me not so much as the slaying. They were
so excessively alive, these pigs. And then, they were so excessively
dead, and the man in the dripping, clammy, not passage did not seem to
care, and ere the blood of such a one had ceased to foam on the floor,
such another and four friends with him had shrieked and died. But a pig
is only the unclean animal--the forbidden of the prophet.
VI. THE AMERICAN ARMY
I SHOULD very much like to deliver a dissertation on the American army
and the possibilities of its extension. You see, it is such a beautiful
little army, and the dear people don't quite understand what to do with
it. The theory is that it is an instructional nucleus round which
the militia of the country will rally, and from which they will get a
stiffening in time of danger. Yet other people consider that the
army should be built, like a pair of lazy tongs--on the principle of
elasticity and extension--so that in time of need it may fill up its
skeleton battalions and empty saddle troops. This is real wisdom,
be-cause the American army, as at present constituted, is made up
of:--Twenty-five regiments infantry, ten companies each.
Ten regiments cavalry, twelve companies each.
Five regiments artillery, twelve companies each.
Now there is a notion in the air to reorganize the service on these
lines:--Eighteen regiments infantry at four battalions, four companies
each; third battalion, skeleton; fourth on paper.
Eight regiments cavalry at four battalions, four troops each; third
battalion, skeleton; fourth on paper.
Five regiments artillery at four battalions, four companies each; third
battalion, skeleton; fourth on paper.
Observe the beauty of this business. The third battalion will have its
officers, but no men; the fourth will probably have a rendezvous and
some equipment.
It is not contemplated to give it anything more definite at present.
Assuming the regiments to be made up to full complement, we get an army
of fifty thousand men, which after the need passes away must be cut down
fifty per cent, to the huge delight of the officers.
The military needs of the States be three: (a) Frontier warfare, an
employment well within the grip of the present army of twenty-five
thousand, and in the nature of things growing less arduous year by year;
(b) internal riots and commotions which rise up like a dust devil, whirl
furiously, and die out long before the authorities at Washington could
begin to fill up even the third skeleton battalions, much less hunt
about for material for the fourth; (c) civil war, in which, as the case
in the affair of the North and South, the regular army would be swamped
in the mass of militia and armed volunteers would turn the land into a
hell.
Yet the authorities persist in regarding an external war as a thing to
be seriously considered.
The Power that would disembark troops on American soil would be capable
of heaving a shovelful of mud into the Atlantic in the hope of filling
it up. Consequently, the authorities are fascinated with the idea of the
sliding scale or concertina army. This is an hereditary instinct, for
you know that when we English have got together two companies, one
machine gun, a sick bullock, forty generals, and a mass of W. O. forms,
we say we possess “an army corps capable of indefinite extension.”
The American army is a beautiful little army. Some day, when all
the Indians are happily dead or drunk, it ought to make the finest
scientific and survey corps that the world has ever seen; it does
excellent work now, but there is this defect in its nature: It is
officered, as you know, from West Point.
The mischief of it is that West Point seems to be created for the
purpose of spreading a general knowledge of military matters among the
people. A boy goes up to that institution, gets his pass, and returns
to civil life, so they tell me, with a dangerous knowledge that he is
a suckling Von Moltke, and may apply his learning when occasion offers.
Given trouble, that man will be a nuisance, because he is a hideously
versatile American, to begin with, as cock-sure of himself as a man
can be, and with all the racial disregard for human life to back him,
through any demi-semi-professional generalship.
In a country where, as the records of the daily papers show, men engaged
in a conflict with police or jails are all too ready to adopt a military
formation and get heavily shot in a sort of cheap, half-constructed
warfare, instead of being decently scared by the appearance of the
military, this sort of arrangement does not seem wise.
The bond between the States is of an amazing tenuity. So long as they
do not absolutely march into the District of Columbia, sit on the
Washington statues, and invent a flag of their own, they can legislate,
lynch, hunt negroes through swamps, divorce, railroad, and rampage
as much as ever they choose. They do not need knowledge of their own
military strength to back their genial lawlessness.
That regular army, which is a dear little army, should be kept to
itself, blooded on detachment duty, turned into the paths of science,
and now and again assembled at feasts of Free Masons, and so forth.
It is too tiny to be a political power. The immortal wreck of the
Grand Army of the Republic is a political power of the largest and most
unblushing description. It ought not to help to lay the foundations of
an amateur military power that is blind and irresponsible.