THE LOCOMOTIVE IN THE STREETS—IN BALTIMORE PUBLIC OPINION FIRST
BECOMES SOUTHERN—GROWTH AND PROSPECTS OF BALTIMORE—ON TRADING
POLITICIANS AND ILL WILL TO ENGLAND—WHY AN AMERICAN TUTOR THOUGHT
NECESSARY FOR AN ENGLISHMAN—REPUDIATION—THE MASSES AND MIDDLE CLASSES
IN FAVOUR OF IT—ARGUMENTS IN FAVOUR OF IT—AN ARGUMENT USED 2,000 MILES
FROM WALL STREET—WHY REPUBLICANS BOUND TO REPUDIATE—AMERICANS ADDICTED
TO ABSTRACT REASONING—INSTANCES.
We very often find a difficulty in getting our horses to take quietly
the sound of a railway train in motion. It was at Baltimore that I
first saw the locomotive dragging a train along the main street of a
city. All the precaution that was taken was merely to ring a bell on
the top of the engine to warn foot-passengers and drivers of carriages.
Many horses were passed, and many crossed the moving train, but I did
not observe that in any instance they took the least notice of it. I
afterwards saw the same arrangement at Chicago, at New York, and at
many other places, and did not anywhere hear that accidents resulted
from it.
[Sidenote: _A Marylander’s Opinion of Government._]
Baltimore was the first place in which I found the general sentiment
strongly Southern. Balls and bazaars were being got up, while I was
there, for the openly avowed purpose of collecting funds to support
those families in the South which had been reduced to poverty by the
late war. This made me feel as if I were among another people; for in
the North I had heard the South spoken of very vindictively, as ‘that
they needed more suffering to take their pride out of them;’ and ‘that
nothing could be done with the South till the present proprietors had
all been swept away, and Northern men substituted for them.’ I am not
aware, however, that I ever heard any remarks of this kind made by
persons whom we should describe as of the upper class.
There has been a large emigration to Baltimore, from the States of the
late Southern Confederacy, of people who would not live under negro
domination as long as they had the means of living elsewhere. Many
Northern men also had lately settled there, in expectation that the
business of the place would rapidly increase. As it has a fine harbour,
and the development of the railway system is now connecting it with the
whole of the interior, there appears to be no reason why it should not,
at no very distant day, become a dangerous rival of Philadelphia and
even of New York. I understood that as many as 4,000 houses were built
here in the last twelve months.
‘Sir,’ said a Maryland planter to me, ‘many Americans, of whom I am
one, think that the English government is the best in the world. No
system of government which, like ours, can breed nothing better than
trading politicians, can be either generous or just; and must sooner or
later fall, overwhelmed by the hatred of some and the contempt of other
sections of the community.’ The same gentleman was of opinion that the
animosity felt towards England after the revolutionary war had now
almost died out among native-born Americans; for instance, there is,
he said, not one Fenian lodge in the whole of New England. Whatever
ill-will there may be existing at present originates in the Irish, and
radiates from them, if in any instances it has spread beyond them. An
Englishman who had been long settled in America, and who took part in
the conversation, thought differently. He was of opinion, that at all
events a strong prejudice existed in the minds of native-born Americans
against the English.
While at dinner at my hotel, a gentleman who was seated opposite to
me—he was one of the few stout men, I believe the only one, I saw in
America—accosted me with the remark ‘that he could not believe what he
understood me to say, that I had not yet been a month in the country,
because’—for this was his reason—‘I spoke the language so well. Or if
I am to believe it,’ he went on, ‘I suppose you had an American tutor
to teach you our language.’ I assured him that he had understood me
rightly, and that I had never had the advantage of the instruction he
considered necessary, nor was there such a great difference between the
language of America and that of England as to make Englishmen feel the
need of American tutors. ‘That, sir,’ he replied, ‘is by no means in
accordance with my experience. I have myself conversed with Englishmen,
and found their language very unlike our own. They seldom know where
to use and where not to use the initial H. And their language is full
of ungrammatical and vulgar expressions, from which ours is entirely
free.’
[Sidenote: _The Language of America._]
This gentleman’s mistake can be easily explained; and the explanation
will show that it is one into which an American may very possibly fall.
It is a remarkable fact that the English spoken in America is not only
very pure, but also is spoken with equal purity by all classes. This in
some measure, of course, results from the success of their educational
efforts, and from the fact which arises out of it that they are, almost
to a man, a nation of readers. But not only is it the same language
without vulgarisms, in the mouths of all classes, but it is the same
language without any dialectical differences over the whole continent.
The language in every man’s mouth is that of literature and of society;
spoken at San Francisco just as it is spoken at New York, and on the
Gulf of Mexico just as on the great lakes. It is even the language of
the negroes in the towns. There is nothing resembling this in Europe,
where every county, as in England, or every province and canton, has
a different dialect. Of this the philological observer I was dining
with was ignorant. He only knew that all Americans spoke uniformly one
dialect. He naturally therefore supposed that all Englishmen must do
the same; and as his acquaintance with Englishmen was confined to poor
immigrants, he imagined that their dialect was the language of all
Englishmen.
Often, in parts of the country most remote from each other, in wooden
shanties and the poorest huts, I had this interesting fact of the
purity and identity of the language of the Americans forced on my
attention. And at such times I thought, not without some feelings of
shame and sorrow, of the wretched vocabulary, consisting of not more
than three or four hundred words, and those often ungrammatically used,
and always more or less mispronounced, of our honest and hard-working
peasantry. As language is the vehicle of ideas, these poor fellows have
not been fairly used, and are being deprived of a large portion of the
rich intellectual patrimony of Englishmen.
[Sidenote: _Will the Debt be Paid?_]
Before I went to America, I felt as certain as one can feel about any
future event, that the Americans would pay every cent of their debt. I
think still they possibly may. For their own sakes and for the honour
of the race I hope they will. But I am not now so positive on this
point as I was. Wherever it was allowable in conversation, I introduced
the subject of the debt. At first, to my surprise (but after a time
I got so accustomed to the expression of the sentiment that I should
have been surprised had I heard anything to the contrary), I never met
a single person in railway cars, or in hotels, who was in favour of
complete payment. Many were in favour of complete repudiation; but far
the greater number advocated the plan of immediate payment, by an issue
to the public creditors of, as I heard it sometimes put, cartloads of
greenbacks. This, of course, would not be very far from repudiation
pure and simple: though nominally a payment in full, it would really
be only the payment of a few shillings in the pound, as so large an
issue would enormously depreciate the value of the greenbacks. This is
the plan of Mr. Pendleton of Ohio, who is now the democratic candidate
for the next presidency. It must therefore be approved generally by
his supporters. The people, at a knowledge of whose sentiments I
arrived in the way I have just mentioned, belonged chiefly, I suppose,
to the class of storekeepers and travelling traders; though I have
sometimes heard persons whose position I knew was better announce
the same opinions. On the other hand, however, I never met with any
flourishing and respectable merchant, and I may almost say with anyone
whom we should describe as belonging to the upper class of society, who
admitted for a moment the possibility of repudiation in any form. It
seems, then, that in forecasting the probabilities of this question,
the class that has numbers on its side must be regarded as pitted
against the class that has on its side cultivation, intelligence, and
wealth. But even from these few, some, as was once observed to me,
ought probably to be discounted; because it is possible that some may
be making a cheap profession of honesty, which they know will not, and
have no wish ever should, be acted on. And the more certain they may
feel of ultimate repudiation, the louder they may declare themselves
in favour of payment. The South, whenever it shall have resumed its
place in the councils of the Union, will, as most people seem to
think, be in favour of the use of the sponge; for how can people be
expected to tax themselves to pay for what was the instrument of their
humiliation, conquest, and ruin? The question, then, between payment
and repudiation, complete or partial, cannot now be decided so clearly
and peremptorily against the latter as one could wish.
Of course the argument most commonly used against payment is, that it
necessitates such a burden of taxation as is no longer tolerable, that
it is impoverishing the whole community, destroying both the home and
the foreign trade, and pressing with peculiar and insupportable weight
on the humbler classes.
Again, it is urged by many that the amount of their taxation is the
one undoubted cause, both of the cost and of the corruption of their
government. If they go back to their old amount of taxation, there will
be no work for, and, what will be more to the purpose, no funds to
maintain, these armies of official bloodsuckers.
I found, too, that there was floating before the minds of some an
entrancing vision of what would be the wealth of the country if
production were cheapened and trade revived, and if everybody had twice
as much money to spend as at present.
Another argument I frequently heard, was made to rest on an attempt to
separate in idea the bondholders and public creditors of all kinds from
the people; and while it spoke of them as an extremely wealthy class,
living in luxury, and doing nothing (a very unrepublican position for
anyone to occupy), it suggested the idea that their wealth was derived
from the burdens, that is to say, the sufferings, of the masses of
the people, who, all the while, were struggling very hard for a bare
subsistence. The object of this comparison is to make the bondholder
an object of odium, and the tax-payers of the humbler classes objects
of commiseration, in the hope that by so doing a rankling sense of
injustice might be implanted in the breast of the latter.
[Sidenote: _Arguments for Repudiation._]
At an hotel in a town on the very frontiers of civilisation, two
thousand miles away from Wall Street, I heard the question of ‘to pay
or not to pay’ debated, and the conclusion in favour of the latter
alternative was clinched by the proof of the impossibility of paying.
The speaker was an ex-judge, and was a man who spoke and reasoned
well,—I mean in such a way as to carry his hearers along with him. His
argument on this point was very concise. ‘Just before the war,’ his
words were, ‘the Government of the United States published a return,
collected by its own officers, of the value of all the property of
the people of the United States. The correctness of this return is
unquestioned. We know from it both the saleable value of the property
of the people and the annual income of that property. The property of
the whole people is for purposes of taxation a single estate, but the
debt we have incurred, plus the capital represented by our ordinary
taxation, is greater in amount than the value of the whole of the
property of the people of the United States; and the interest to be
paid on the debt, plus the taxation required for other purposes,
general and local, is greater than the income of the property of the
whole people. And as no private estate can carry a debt greater in
amount than the value of the estate, so no country can bear burdens
that represent a property, if they were capitalised, greater than the
property of the country, and an annual amount of taxation greater
than the income of that property. I will not say, then, that the debt
must be repudiated, for that would imply that we had some option in
the matter; I will only say that it is impossible that it should be
paid, either capital or interest. The estate can’t do it. It is an
impossibility.’ Both the statements of this argument and the inference
drawn from them appeared to the audience unquestionable. There was a
murmur of assent, and conviction was expressed on every face.
I will report the firing off of one more shot against the payment
of the debt which I was so fortunate as to witness. It is worth
mentioning, both for the sake of the _entourage_ and because it
involves a style of argument I found very frequently used, and with
convincing effect, among the people of the United States.
[Sidenote: _Arguments for Repudiation._]
The Governor of ——, one of the largest States in the Union, had been so
good as to invite me to call upon him, that I might be introduced to
some friend of his who would be with him on the following day. On being
shown into the reception-room, I found the Governor seated in a kind
of state, with his back to the fire and his feet on the table. On the
opposite side were seated in a row eight or ten persons. They appeared
to be a deputation from some town or association, who were then having
an interview with the Governor. When the interruption caused by my
entrance was over, a tall grey-headed man who had been speaking as I
entered resumed his argument. He had rather the look of a well-to-do
farmer, not of our stolid type, but of the keen American type. He
was quick and incisive in his style of speaking, and dealt much with
interrogatories, as is common with persons who have been mastered by
an idea, and cannot but think that it must appear to others just in
the light in which it appears to themselves. He proceeded:—‘What I want
to know is, whether this is not a republic?’ He looked round, and was
satisfied with the amount of apparent assent. ‘The next thing I would
ask is, what is the meaning of a republic?’ No one was prepared with
an answer, and so he proposed one himself. ‘A monarchy is a government
where everything is contrived for the advantage of an individual. An
aristocracy is a government where everything is contrived for the
advantage of a few. But a republic is a government in which whatever
is for the advantage of the greater number either is or ought to be
law. And now I ask another question: would it not be for the advantage
of the greater part of the citizens of this State, and for the greater
part of the citizens of the United States, that we should have no
debt?’ This was an unassailable position; and so he at once proceeded
to the conclusion. ‘Well then, I say, that if this is a republic there
ought to be a law passed to free us from this debt. If we are not
repudiators we are not republicans.’ I am unable to report any other
arguments that were urged by the deputation, for at this point the
Governor conducted me into another room.
The method of reasoning contained in the gaunt old gentleman’s argument
against the payment of debts by republicans is, as I observed, very
frequently used and very well received in the United States. It is
worth noticing, because it is a method that is seldom used and never
accepted on this side the water. It proceeds by assuming the truth
of some abstract propositions, of which neither truth nor falsehood
can properly be predicated, but which a half-instructed audience is
always ready to accept, and then goes on to apply them to some question
on which they appear to have a bearing, and which happens to be
interesting at the moment. For instance, I was speaking on the subject
of negro suffrage with one of the leading supporters of that concession
in the South. An Englishman would probably have confined himself to the
consideration of the fitness of the African for so important a part in
the government of the country. My American friend contented himself
with a kind of numerical formula. ‘Suppose,’ he said, ‘the grown-up
male population of the country is represented by the number 100. By
excluding the negroes from the franchise, you reduce the voters to
about one-half, that is 50. But, in a constituency of 50, a majority of
26 will rule. That is to say, 26 will rule 100. That is bad, but it is
not all the evil of the restriction. In small bodies it is generally
found that one resolute mind takes the lead. The result therefore would
be that one would rule the 100. All this would be the consequence of
departing from the simple republican rule of giving the vote equally
to all.’ The gentleman had this formularised argument in favour of the
admission of the African to equal political power with the white race
drawn out on a paper, which he took from his pocket-book and showed
me—I quite believe, with the idea that I should find it unanswerable.
It was all in vain that I pointed out to him that his argument was so
abstract that it omitted all consideration of every one of the actual
conditions of the question. He himself was thoroughly persuaded of its
conclusiveness.
[Sidenote: _Americans addicted to Abstract Reasoning._]
Another argument of just the same kind, but which aimed at the opposite
conclusion, was frequently urged upon me. ‘Have you read,’ I was asked,
‘Bishop ——’s book?’ I forget the name of the ingenious prelate. ‘He
has demonstrated that the negro is not a man. No human being was saved
from the Flood except Noah’s family, and it is quite impossible that he
could have had a negro son. The negro must therefore at that time have
been regarded as a brute beast. And as Noah was acting under Divine
guidance, he could not have been wrong in his estimate of the negro.
And the negro cannot be any better now than he was then, for a brute
beast can never become a man. We therefore are justified in looking
upon him just as Noah looked upon him, and in supposing that he is of
the gorilla race, only a little improved.’
I do not mean that a well-educated American would be at all more
disposed to accept this kind of argument than a well-educated
Englishman, but that it goes down with multitudes of Americans who have
from their youth up had very little time for acquiring any knowledge
but that of their business, yet feel themselves called on by the
circumstances of American life to form and express opinions on almost
every subject; and this is a call to which few are slow in responding.