by a burned bridge, brought me to the city on a Saturday by way of that
valley which the Mormons, over their efforts, had caused to blossom like
the rose. Twelve hours previously I had entered into a new world where,
in conversation, every one was either a Mormon or a Gentile. It is not
seemly for a free and independent citizen to dub himself a Gentile, but
the Mayor of Ogden--which is the Gentile city of the valley--told me
that there must be some distinction between the two flocks.
Long before the fruit orchards of Logan or the shining levels of the
Salt Lake had been reached, that mayor--himself a Gentile, and one
renowned for his dealings with the Mormons--told me that the great
question of the existence of the power within the power was being
gradually solved by the ballot and by education.
All the beauty of the valley could not make me forget it. And the valley
is very fair. Bench after bench of land, flat as a table against the
flanks of the ringing hills, marks where the Salt Lake rested for awhile
in its collapse from an inland sea to a lake fifty miles long and thirty
broad.
There are the makings of a very fine creed about Mormonism. To begin
with, the Church is rather more absolute than that of Rome. Drop the
polygamy plank in the platform, but on the other hand deal lightly with
certain forms of excess; keep the quality of the recruit down to the
low mental level, and see that the best of all the agricultural
science available is in the hands of the elders, and there you have
a first-class engine for pioneer work. The tawdry mysticism and the
borrowing from Freemasonry serve the low caste Swede and Dane, the
Welshman and the Cornish cotter, just as well as a highly organized
heaven.
Then I went about the streets and peeped into people's front windows,
and the decorations upon the tables were after the manner of the year
1850. Main Street was full of country folk from the desert, come in to
trade with the Zion Mercantile Co-operative Institute. The Church, I
fancy, looks after the finances of this thing, and it consequently pays
good dividends.
The faces of the women were not lovely. In-deed, but for the certainty
that ugly persons are just as irrational in the matter of undivided love
as the beautiful, it seems that polygamy was a blessed institution for
the women, and that only the dread threats of the spiritual power could
drive the hulking, board-faced men into it. The women wore hideous
garments, and the men appeared to be tied up with strings.
They would market all that afternoon, and on Sunday go to the
praying-place. I tried to talk to a few of them, but they spoke strange
tongues, and stared and behaved like cows. Yet one woman, and not an
altogether ugly one, confided to me that she hated the idea of Salt Lake
City being turned into a show-place for the amusement of the Gentiles.
“If we 'have our own institutions, that ain't no reason why people
should come 'ere and stare at us, his it?”
The dropped “h” betrayed her.
“And when did you leave England?” I said.
“Summer of '84. I am Dorset,” she said. “The Mormon agent was very
good to us, and we was very poor. Now we're better off--my father, an'
mother, an' me.”
“Then you like the State?”
She misunderstood at first.
“Oh, I ain't livin' in the state of polygamy. Not me, yet. I ain't
married. I like where I am. I've got things o' my own--and some land.”
“But I suppose you will--”
“Not me. I ain't like them Swedes an' Danes. I ain't got nothin' to say
for or against polygamy. It's the elders' business, an' between you an'
me, I don't think it's going on much longer. You'll 'ear them in the
'ouse to-morrer talkin' as if it was spreadin' all over America. The
Swedes, they think it his. I know it hisn't.”
“But you've got your land all right?”
“Oh, yes; we've got our land, an' we never say aught against polygamy,
o' course--father, an' mother, an' me.”
On a table-land overlooking all the city stands the United States
garrison of infantry and artillery. The State of Utah can do nearly
anything it pleases until that much-to-be-desired hour when the Gentile
vote shall quietly swamp out Mormonism; but the garrison is kept there
in case of accidents. The big, shark-mouthed, pig-eared, heavy-boned
farmers sometimes take to their creed with wildest fanaticism, and in
past years have made life excessively unpleasant for the Gentile when he
was few in the land. But to-day, so far from killing openly or secretly,
or burning Gentile farms, it is all the Mormon dare do to feebly try
to boycott the interloper. His journals preach defiance to the United
States Government, and in the Tabernacle on a Sunday the preachers
follow suit.
When I went there, the place was full of people who would have been much
better for a washing.
A man rose up and told them that they were the chosen of God, the elect
of Israel; that they were to obey their priests, and that there was a
good time coming. I fancy that they had heard all this before so
many times it produced no impression whatever, even as the sublimest
mysteries of another faith lose salt through constant iteration. They
breathed heavily through their noses, and stared straight in front of
them--impassive as flat fish.
VII. AMERICA'S DEFENCELESS COASTS
JUST suppose that America were twenty days distant from England. Then a
man could study its customs with undivided soul; but being so very
near next door, he goes about the land with one eye on the smoke of the
flesh-pots of the old country across the seas, while with the other he
squints biliously and prejudicially at the alien.
I can lay my hand upon my sacred heart and affirm that up to to-day I
have never taken three consecutive trips by rail without being delayed
by an accident. That it was an accident to another train makes no
difference. My own turn may come next.
A few miles from peaceful, pleasure-loving Lakewood they had managed to
upset an express goods train to the detriment of the flimsy permanent
way; and thus the train which should have left at three departed at
seven in the evening. I was not angry. I was scarcely even interested.
When an American train starts on time I begin to anticipate disaster--a
visitation for such good luck, you understand.
Buffalo is a large village of a quarter of a million inhabitants,
situated on the seashore, which is falsely called Lake Erie. It is a
peaceful place, and more like an English county town than most of its
friends.
Once clear of the main business streets, you launch upon miles and miles
of asphalted roads running between cottages and cut-stone residences of
those who have money and peace. All the Eastern cities own this fringe
of elegance, but except in Chicago nowhere is the fringe deeper or more
heavily widened than in Buffalo.
The American will go to a bad place because he cannot speak English,
and is proud of it; but he knows how to make a home for himself and his
mate, knows how to keep the grass green in front of his veranda, and how
to fullest use the mechanism of life--hot water, gas, good bell-ropes,
telephones, etc. His shops sell him delightful household fitments
at very moderate rates, and he is encompassed with all manner of
labor-saving appliances. This does not prevent his wife and his daughter
working themselves to death over household drudgery; but the intention
is good.
When you have seen the outside of a few hundred thousand of these homes
and the insides of a few score, you begin to understand why the American
(the respectable one) does not take a deep interest in what they call
“politics,” and why he is so vaguely and generally proud of the country
that enables him to be so comfortable. How can the owner of a dainty
chalet, with smoked-oak furniture, imitation Venetian tapestry curtains,
hot and cold water laid on, a bed of geraniums and hollyhocks, a baby
crawling down the veranda, and a self-acting twirly-whirly hose gently
hissing over the grass in the balmy dusk of an August evening--how
can such a man despair of the Republic, or descend into the streets on
voting days and mix cheerfully with “the boys”?
No, it is the stranger--the homeless jackal of a stranger--whose
interest in the country is limited to his hotel-bill and a
railway-ticket, that can run from Dan to Beersheba, crying:--“All is
barren!”
Every good American wants a home--a pretty house and a little piece of
land of his very own; and every other good American seems to get it.
It was when my gigantic intellect was grappling with this question
that I confirmed a discovery half made in the West. The natives of
most classes marry young--absurdly young. One of my informants--not the
twenty-two-year-old husband I met on Lake Chautauqua--said that from
twenty to twenty-four was about the usual time for this folly. And
when I asked whether the practice was confined to the constitutionally
improvident classes, he said “No” very quickly. He said it was a general
custom, and nobody saw anything wrong with it.
“I guess, perhaps, very early marriage may account for a good deal of
the divorce,” said he, reflectively.
Whereat I was silent. Their marriages and their divorces only concern
these people; and neither I travelling, nor you, who may come after,
have any right to make rude remarks about them. Only--only coming from
a land where a man begins to lightly turn to thoughts of love not before
he is thirty, I own that playing at house-keeping before that age rather
surprised me. Out in the West, though, they marry, boys and girls, from
sixteen upward, and I have met more than one bride of fifteen--husband
aged twenty.
“When man and woman are agreed, what can the Kazi do?”
From those peaceful homes, and the envy they inspire (two trunks and
a walking-stick and a bit of pine forest in British Columbia are not
satisfactory, any way you look at them), I turned me to the lake front
of Buffalo, where the steamers bellow to the grain elevators, and the
locomotives yell to the coal-shutes, and the canal barges jostle the
lumber-raft half a mile long as it snakes across the water in tow of a
launch, and earth, and sky, and sea alike are thick with smoke.
In the old days, before the railway ran into the city, all the business
quarters fringed the lake-shore where the traffic was largest. To-day
the business quarters have gone up-town to meet the railroad; the lake
traffic still exists, but you shall find a narrow belt of red-brick
desolation, broken windows, gap-toothed doors, and streets where the
grass grows between the crowded wharves and the bustling city. To the
lake front comes wheat from Chicago, lumber, coal, and ore, and a large
trade in cheap excursionists.
It was my felicity to catch a grain steamer and an elevator emptying
that same steamer. The steamer might have been two thousand tons burden.
She was laden with wheat in bulk; from stem to stern, thirteen feet
deep, lay the clean, red wheat. There was no twenty-five per cent dirt
admixture about it at all. It was wheat, fit for the grindstones as it
lay. They manoeuvred the fore-hatch of that steamer directly under an
elevator--a house of red tin a hundred and fifty feet high. Then they
let down into that fore-hatch a trunk as if it had been the trunk of an
elephant, but stiff, because it was a pipe of iron-champed wood. And
the trunk had a steel-shod nose to it, and contained an endless chain of
steel buckets.
Then the captain swore, raising his eyes to heaven, and a gruff voice
answered him from the place he swore at, and certain machinery, also in
the firmament, began to clack, and the glittering, steel-shod nose of
that trunk burrowed into the wheat, and the wheat quivered and sunk
upon the instant as water sinks when the siphon sucks, because the steel
buckets within the trunk were flying upon their endless round, carrying
away each its appointed morsel of wheat.
The elevator was a Persian well wheel--a wheel squashed out thin
and cased in a pipe, a wheel driven not by bullocks, but by much
horse-power, licking up the grain at the rate of thou-sands of
bushels the hour. And the wheat sunk into the fore-hatch while a man
looked--sunk till the brown timbers of the bulkheads showed bare, and
men leaped down through clouds of golden dust and shovelled the wheat
furiously round the nose of the trunk, and got a steam-shovel of
glittering steel and made that shovel also, till there remained of the
grain not more than a horse leaves in the fold of his nose-bag.
In this manner do they handle wheat at Buffalo. On one side of the
elevator is the steamer, on the other the railway track; and the wheat
is loaded into the cars in bulk. Wah! wah! God is great, and I do not
think He ever intended Gar Sahai or Luckman Narain to supply England
with her wheat. India can cut in not without profit to herself when her
harvest is good and the American yield poor; but this very big country
can, upon the average, supply the earth with all the beef and bread that
is required.
A man in the train said to me:--“We kin feed all the earth, jest as
easily as we kin whip all the earth.”
Now the second statement is as false as the first is true. One of these
days the respectable Republic will find this out.
Unfortunately we, the English, will never be the people to teach her;
because she is a chartered libertine allowed to say and do anything
she likes, from demanding the head of the empress in an editorial
waste-basket, to chevying Canadian schooners up and down the Alaska
Seas. It is perfectly impossible to go to war with these people,
whatever they may do.
They are much too nice, in the first place, and in the second, it would
throw out all the passenger traffic of the Atlantic, and upset the
financial arrangements of the English syndicates who have invested their
money in breweries, railways, and the like, and in the third, it's not
to be done. Everybody knows that, and no one better than the American.
Yet there are other powers who are not “ohai band” (of the
brotherhood)--China, for instance. Try to believe an irresponsible
writer when he assures you that China's fleet to-day, if properly
manned, could waft the entire American navy out of the water and into
the blue. The big, fat Republic that is afraid of nothing, because
nothing up to the present date has happened to make her afraid, is as
unprotected as a jelly-fish. Not internally, of course--it would be
madness for any Power to throw men into America; they would die--but as
far as regards coast defence.
From five miles out at sea (I have seen a test of her “fortified” ports)
a ship of the power of H. M. S. “Collingwood” (they haven't run her on
a rock yet) would wipe out any or every town from San Francisco to Long
Branch; and three first-class ironclads would account for New York,
Bartholdi's Statue and all.
Reflect on this. 'Twould be “Pay up or go up” round the entire coast
of the United States. To this furiously answers the patriotic
American:--“We should not pay. We should invent a Columbiad in Pittsburg
or--or anywhere else, and blow any outsider into h--l.”
They might invent. They might lay waste their cities and retire inland,
for they can subsist entirely on their own produce. Meantime, in a war
waged the only way it could be waged by an unscrupulous Power, their
coast cities and their dock-yards would be ashes. They could construct
their navy inland if they liked, but you could never bring a ship down
to the water-ways, as they stand now.
They could not, with an ordinary water patrol, despatch one regiment
of men six miles across the seas. There would be about five million
excessively angry, armed men pent up within American limits. These men
would require ships to get themselves afloat. The country has no such
ships, and until the ships were built New York need not be allowed a
single-wheeled carriage within her limits.
Behold now the glorious condition of this Republic which has no fear.
There is ransom and loot past the counting of man on her seaboard
alone--plunder that would enrich a nation--and she has neither a navy
nor half a dozen first-class ports to guard the whole. No man catches a
snake by the tail, because the creature will sting; but you can build a
fire around a snake that will make it squirm.
The country is supposed to be building a navy now. When the ships are
completed her alliance will be worth having--if the alliance of any
republic can be relied upon. For the next three years she can be hurt,
and badly hurt. Pity it is that she is of our own blood, looking at the
matter from a Pindarris point of view. Dog cannot eat dog.
These sinful reflections were prompted by the sight of the beautifully
unprotected condition of Buffalo--a city that could be made to pay up
five million dollars without feeling it. There are her companies of
infantry in a sort of port there. A gun-boat brought over in pieces from
Niagara could get the money and get away before she could be caught,
while an unarmored gun-boat guarding Toronto could ravage the towns on
the lakes. When one hears so much of the nation that can whip the earth,
it is, to say the least of it, surprising to find her so temptingly
spankable.
The average American citizen seems to have a notion that any Power
engaged in strife with the Star Spangled Banner will disembark men from
flat-bottomed boats on a convenient beach for the purpose of being shot
down by local militia. In his own simple phraseology:--“Not by a darned
sight. No, sir.”
Ransom at long range will be about the size of it--cash or crash.
Let us revisit calmer scenes.
In the heart of Buffalo there stands a magnificent building which the
population do innocently style a music-hall. Everybody comes here
of evenings to sit around little tables and listen to a first-class
orchestra. The place is something like the Gaiety Theatre at Simla,
enlarged twenty times. The “Light Brigade” of Buffalo occupy the boxes
and the stage, “as it was at Simla in the days of old,” and the others
sit in the parquet. Here I went with a friend--poor or boor is the man
who cannot pick up a friend for a season in America--and here was shown
the really smart folk of the city. I grieve to say I laughed, because
when an American wishes to be correct he sets himself to imitate the
Englishman. This he does vilely, and earns not only the contempt of his
brethren, but the amused scorn of the Briton.
I saw one man who was pointed out to me as being the glass of fashion
hereabouts. He was aggressively English in his get-up. From eye-glass
to trouser-hem the illusion was perfect, but--he wore with evening-dress
buttoned boots with brown cloth tops! Not till I wandered about this
land did I understand why the comic papers belabor the Anglomaniac.
Certain young men of the more idiotic sort launch into dog-carts and
raiment of English cut, and here in Buffalo they play polo at four
in the afternoon. I saw three youths come down to the polo-ground
faultlessly attired for the game and mounted on their best ponies.
Expecting a game, I lingered; but I was mistaken. These three shining
ones with the very new yellow hide boots and the red silk sashes had
assembled themselves for the purpose of knocking the ball about. They
smote with great solemnity up and down the grounds, while the little
boys looked on. When they trotted, which was not seldom, they rose
and sunk in their stirrups with a conscientiousness that cried out
“Riding-school!” from afar.
Other young men in the park were riding after the English manner, in
neatly cut riding-trousers and light saddles. Fate in derision had
made each youth bedizen his animal with a checkered enamelled leather
brow-band visible half a mile away--a black-and-white checkered
brow-band! They can't do it, any more than an Englishman, by taking
cold, can add that indescribable nasal twang to his orchestra.
The other sight of the evening was a horror. The little tragedy played
itself out at a neighboring table where two very young men and two very
young women were sitting. It did not strike me till far into the evening
that the pimply young reprobates were making the girls drunk. They gave
them red wine and then white, and the voices rose slightly with the
maidens' cheek flushes. I watched, wishing to stay, and the youths drank
till their speech thickened and their eye-balls grew watery. It was
sickening to see, because I knew what was going to happen. My friend
eyed the group, and said:--“Maybe they're children of respectable
people. I hardly think, though, they'd be allowed out without any better
escort than these boys. And yet the place is a place where every one
comes, as you see. They may be Little Immoralities--in which case they
wouldn't be so hopelessly overcome with two glasses of wine. They may
be--”
Whatever they were they got indubitably drunk--there in that lovely
hall, surrounded by the best of Buffalo society. One could do nothing
except invoke the judgment of Heaven on the two boys, themselves half
sick with liquor. At the close of the performance the quieter maiden
laughed vacantly and protested she couldn't keep her feet. The four
linked arms, and staggering, flickered out into the street--drunk,
gentlemen and ladies, as Davy's swine, drunk as lords! They disappeared
down a side avenue, but I could hear their laughter long after they were
out of sight.
And they were all four children of sixteen and seventeen. Then,
recanting previous opinions, I became a prohibitionist. Better it is
that a man should go without his beer in public places, and content
himself with swearing at the narrow-mindedness of the majority; better
it is to poison the inside with very vile temperance drinks, and to buy
lager furtively at back-doors, than to bring temptation to the lips
of young fools such as the four I had seen. I understand now why the
preachers rage against drink. I have said: “There is no harm in it,
taken moderately;” and yet my own demand for beer helped directly to
send those two girls reeling down the dark street to--God alone knows
what end.
If liquor is worth drinking, it is worth taking a little trouble to come
at--such trouble as a man will undergo to compass his own desires. It
is not good that we should let it lie before the eyes of children, and
I have been a fool in writing to the contrary. Very sorry for myself, I
sought a hotel, and found in the hall a reporter who wished to know what
I thought of the country. Him I lured into conversation about his own
profession, and from him gained much that confirmed me in my views
of the grinding tyranny of that thing which they call the Press here.
Thus:--I--But you talk about interviewing people whether they like it or
not. Have you no bounds beyond which even your indecent curiosity must
not go?
HE--I haven't struck 'em yet. What do you think of interviewing a widow
two hours after her husband's death, to get her version of his life?
I--I think that is the work of a ghoul. Must the people have no privacy?
HE--There is no domestic privacy in America. If there was, what the
deuce would the papers do? See here. Some time ago I had an assignment
to write up the floral tributes when a prominent citizen had died.
I--Translate, please; I do not understand your pagan rites and
ceremonies.
HE--I was ordered by the office to describe the flowers, and wreaths,
and so on, that had been sent to a dead man's funeral. Well, I went
to the house. There was no one there to stop me, so I yanked the
tinkler--pulled the bell--and drifted into the room where the corpse
lay all among the roses and smilax. I whipped out my note-book and pawed
around among the floral tributes, turn-ing up the tickets on the wreaths
and seeing who had sent them. In the middle of this I heard some one
saying: “Please, oh, please!” behind me, and there stood the daughter of
the house, just bathed in tears--I--You unmitigated brute!
HE--Pretty much what I felt myself. “I'm very sorry, miss,” I said,
“to intrude on the privacy of your grief. Trust me, I shall make it as
little painful as possible.”
I--But by what conceivable right did you outrage--HE--Hold your horses.
I'm telling you. Well, she didn't want me in the house at all,
and between her sobs fairly waved me away. I had half the tributes
described, though, and the balance I did partly on the steps when the
stiff 'un came out, and partly in the church. The preacher gave the
sermon. That wasn't my assignment. I skipped about among the floral
tributes while he was talking. I could have made no excuse if I had gone
back to the office and said that a pretty girl's sobs had stopped me
obeying orders. I had to do it. What do you think of it all?
I (slowly)--Do you want to know?
HE (with his note-book ready)--Of course. How do you regard it?