AMERICAN HOTELS—WHY SOME PEOPLE IN AMERICA TRAVEL WITHOUT ANY
LUGGAGE—CONVERSATION AT TABLES-D’HÔTE SHOULD BE ENCOURAGED—THE
IRISH, THE AFRICAN, AND THE CHINESE—CAN A REPUBLIC DO WITHOUT A
SERVILE CLASS?—WHAT WILL BE THE ULTIMATE FATE OF THESE THREE RACES IN
AMERICA—NO CHILDREN—MOTIVES—MEANS—CONSEQUENCES—WHY MANY YOUNG MEN AND
YOUNG WOMEN MAKE SHIPWRECK OF HAPPINESS IN AMERICA—THE COURSE MANY
FAMILIES RUN—AMERICA THE HUB OF THE WORLD.
During the week I was at Boston, I dined for the last time in an
American hotel; for the fortnight I afterwards spent in my second visit
to New York, I passed in the hospitable house of Mr. Henry Eyre, a
brother of the Rector of Marylebone, and a worthy representative of
Englishmen in the commercial capital of America. With this exception,
at the close of my tour, I made it a rule, from which I never departed,
to decline all invitations to stay in private houses. My reason for
doing this was, that I might come and go as I pleased, and have my time
always at my own disposal. This gave me abundant opportunities, as my
travels extended over 8,000 miles of American ground, for forming an
estimate of their hotels and hotel life. With a few exceptions here
and there, in some of the large eastern cities, the hotels are on the
monster scale, and managed on the American system. The exceptions are
called English, or European hotels, and their speciality is that you
only pay in them for what you have. On the American system you pay so
much a day for board and lodging; liquors and washing being extras.
That the American system is the cheapest and most convenient, is
demonstrated by its universality. The few exceptions that exist have
to be inquired after and sought out. A traveller will also avoid them,
because he is desirous of seeing the manners and customs of the people;
and these can nowhere be seen so readily, and to such an extent, as in
the monster hotels. They are a genuine production of the soil, are in
perfect harmony with American wants and ideas, and are all alike.
[Sidenote: _American Hotels._]
Their distinguishing features are that the greater part of their
guests are not travellers, but lodgers and boarders; and that they
have one fixed charge for all, of so many dollars a day. The dearest
I entered was the Fifth Avenue Hotel at New York, which charged five
dollars a day; the board consisting of five such meals as no hotel in
England or Europe could supply without bankruptcy. They are enabled to
do this, because they have to supply these meals for several hundred
persons. And they have this large number of guests, because multitudes
of families, that they may escape the expense and annoyances of
house-keeping, live in the hotels, and multitudes of men in business,
keeping only a counting-house or a store in the city, do the same.
The cheapest I was ever in charged three dollars and a half a-day.
The service is so well organised in these hotels, that you may come
or go at any hour of the night; and you can get your linen washed and
returned to your room in a few hours. While dressing one morning at
the Sherman House at Chicago, I sent out my linen to the laundry; on
going back to my room at half-past eleven, I found that it had been
washed and returned. This rapidity with which the washing of linen is
performed in America enables one to travel with much less than would
be requisite in Europe; and it explains why one often sees people
travelling in America with no more than they can carry in a little
hand-bag, called, in the language of the country, a satchel.
It does not, however, explain why some people in America travel with
no luggage at all. Some of those whom I observed entering and leaving
the cars in this light and unimpeded fashion, told me they had adopted
the system because the work of the washerwoman had been advancing among
them, not more in rapidity than it had done in costliness, so that it
was now cheaper to get a new article, something at the same time being
allowed for the old soiled one, than to send one of the same species
to the laundry of the hotel. By acting on this idea they had escaped
the necessity of taking with them relays of linen. I suppose this
system must be an encouragement to the trade in paper shirt-collars.
The difficulty as to razors, brushes, and combs, is easily met by the
provision made in the barber’s shop of every hotel. The Americans
are full of original ideas, and they are very great travellers; it
was therefore to be expected that they would be the first people to
organise and perfect a system of travelling like the birds of the air.
[Sidenote: _Conversation at Meals._]
The Americans having now revolutionised throughout the whole country
the method of serving hotel dinners, passing at one step from what was
the worst method of all to what is greatly in advance of the practice
in this matter of all other nations, I would venture to suggest
another change in a matter of still greater importance. It is evident
that civilisation would have been quite an impossibility, if people
had not met together at meals for the purpose of conversation. This
alone rescues the act of taking one’s food from its animal character,
and associates it with the exercise of our moral and intellectual
qualities. If we do not meet together, and converse, and exchange
thought, and cultivate courtesies, our meals differ in no respects
from the act of a horse or of a pig taking a feed. It is a strange
mistake to suppose that there is anything intellectual or _spirituel_
in hurrying through one’s meals. The truth of the matter is exactly the
reverse. To tarry at the table for the purpose of conversation makes
every meal a school for the intellect, and for the promotion of the
domestic and social graces. The savage hurries over his meals because
he is a savage, morally and intellectually near of kin to the brute. If
he could tarry over his meals he would have ceased to be a savage. All
ancient and modern nations that have been highly civilised have acted
instinctively on this idea. The Attic _symposia_, as well as the French
_petits soupers_, rested upon it. Suppose meals are to be silently
hurried through, they become mere brutish acts of eating and drinking,
which any animal can perform as well as ourselves, and in much less
time too. It is here that the Americans have a grand opportunity, in
their widely diffused and generally practised hotel life, of which, it
seemed to me, they were not availing themselves. You will see people
day after day sit down to the same table, take their food in silence,
and leave the table without a word having been spoken. You may observe
several tables occupied at the same time in your neighbourhood, and
there shall be no conversation going on at any one of them. Those
who sit at them appear to be entirely occupied either with their own
thoughts or with attention to what they are eating. But it would make
hotel life far more agreeable, and impart to it a far greater amount
of civilising power, if it were the rule that people who meet at the
same table might converse with one another, without any previous
acquaintance, and without any necessity for subsequent acquaintance.
Let it be understood that on such occasions conversation is the correct
and the civilised thing.
No American will ever undertake any of the lower forms of labour—very
few of the men before the mast in American ships are native-born. The
class of agricultural labourers is unknown among them. What labour they
have of this kind is supplied by immigration. No American would become
a footman or hotel waiter. Their railways were not made by American
navvies. In the North all the lower kinds of labour—but which, though
they rank low as employments, are still necessary to the well-being,
even to the existence of society—have hitherto fallen to the lot of the
Irish, English, and German immigrants. Their place has been taken in
the South by the blacks, and in the Pacific States by the Chinese.
[Sidenote: _The Future of the Servile Classes._]
This suggests two very interesting questions. The first is, Can a
republic be carried on without a servile class? What would be the state
of things in the American Union if it were deprived of the services of
the Irish, the blacks, and the Chinese? Of course the loss would be
much felt, and would very much retard the progress of the country; but
I do not think that it would be a loss that would be irremediable and
ruinous. As soon as the country begins to fill up, there will begin to
appear in America the class that has existed in every country in the
world, composed of those who have neither property nor a knowledge of
any trade (which can seldom be obtained by those who have no property),
and who therefore have nothing to live upon except their power of doing
rude and unskilled work.
The other question is, What will be the future in the American Republic
of these three races? The African, we may be sure, will either die
out, which is most probable, or become a low caste, the pariahs of
the New World: retail trade and a few of the lower kinds of labour
and employment will be open to them. They will possess civil but
not political rights. The Irish will be absorbed into the general
population; and so one may speculate to what extent this will affect
the American character. The Chinese can never be absorbed. What
therefore will be the position that they will occupy in the Union fifty
or a hundred years hence? Hitherto only one State has been open to
them, that of California. Can anything be inferred from the position
they have created for themselves in that State? I think we may be
safe in supposing that, as they have already crossed the Pacific to
the number of sixty thousand, when by the completion of the Pacific
Railway the whole of the Union is thrown open to them, they will not
remain cooped up in California. In a few years I believe they will be
found in New York, and in all the large cities of the west and east.
Voltaire said that the true wall of China was the American continent,
the interposition of which saved it from European invasion; but it
appears now that the American continent is the very point at which the
European races will be invaded by the long pent up population of China.
To what extent will this invasion be carried? and what consequences
will result from it? One thing, I think, may be foreseen—the Americans
will not admit these Asiatics, aliens in religion as well as in race,
to political equality with themselves.
A recent writer on America has informed us that there is a
disinclination among the wives of the luxurious cities of the Atlantic
seaboard to become mothers. I found, after enquiry made everywhere on
the spot, that this indisposition to bring up children is not confined
to the wives or to the cities this writer’s words indicate, but is
participated in, to a large extent, by the husbands, and is coextensive
with the American Union. It is just as strongly felt at Denver, two
thousand miles away, as at New York, and results in almost as much evil
at New Orleans as at Chicago.
[Sidenote: _Limitation of Offspring._]
The feeling—or, it might be said, this absence of natural feeling—may
easily be explained. The expenses and annoyances of house-keeping are
in America very great; and young couples, except when they are rich—and
such cases must always form a small minority—generally escape them by
living in hotels. Hotel living is always according to tariff, so much
a week for each person. To a couple living in this way, and barely
able to find the means for it, the cost of every additional child can
be calculated to a dollar, and is seriously felt. As long as they
are without children they may get on comfortably enough, and go into
society, and frequent places of amusement. But if encumbered with the
expense of a family, they will have to live a far quieter and less gay
life. They cannot give up their autumn excursion, they cannot give up
balls, and dresses, and concerts, and carriages. Therefore the husband
and wife come to an understanding that they will have but one child, or
that they will have no children at all.
Another reason for the practice, which would appear to affect the wife
only, but which has frequently much weight with the husband also, is
that the American lady’s reign is not, under any circumstances, a
long one. She has generally considerable personal attractions, but
the climate and the habits, of living are so trying that beauty is
very short-lived. The young wife therefore argues, ‘My good time will
under any circumstances be short; why, therefore, should I prematurely
dilapidate myself by having half-a-dozen children? And indeed what
would that come to, but that I should have no good time at all, for
the whole of it would be given up to the nursery? And by the time this
would be over, I should be nothing but a wreck; my good looks will have
disappeared, and I shall have fallen into premature old age.’
I met with husbands who themselves justified the practice on these
grounds. They did not wish to have their wives, during the whole period
of their good looks, in the nursery.
There is no secret as to the various means resorted to for carrying out
these unnatural resolutions. They are advertised in every newspaper,
and there are professors of the art in abundance, judging from the
advertisements, in every city. There is one large establishment in the
most fashionable street in the city of New York, from whence the great
high priestess of this evil system dispenses her drugs and advice, and
where also she receives those who need her direct assistance. These
things are so notorious and are so much talked of, that one is absolved
from the necessity of being at all reticent about them.
No one, of course, would suppose that any practice of this kind, so
abhorrent to our best natural instincts, could become universal: nor is
it so in America: many denounce it. But still it spreads; and we cannot
expect that it will die away, as long as the motives which prompt it
continue to be felt as strongly as they are at present.
I will note one of the evil consequences of the practice. When those
who have acted in this unnatural way are no longer young, and the
motives which prompted their conduct have ceased to have any weight,
the husband and wife find that there is no tie between them. They have
no reason to respect each other. Each condemns the other, and is in the
other’s presence self-condemned. And this is one of the causes of the
numerous divorces which so much astonish those who look into the social
conditions of American life. Nature and our common moral sense will
avenge themselves for such outrages.
[Sidenote: _Life-wrecks in America._]
A stranger travelling in America is not likely to receive letters
to any except prosperous persons, and so, unless he is on his guard
against it, his personal experience is likely to be confined to the
bright and splendid side of society. But from the observations and
enquiries I made, I came to the conclusion that there is no country in
which the proportion of those whose destiny it is to suffer complete
eclipse of happiness is so great as in the United States. Among
men one chief cause of this appeared to me to be the irresistible
attraction a life of heartless dissipation has for multitudes of young
Americans. Why is this so? I believe their theory of social equality
is responsible for some of it. They have a fatal craving to appear as
fashionable, and to enjoy life as much as their wealthy neighbours.
But I do not suppose that this will account for everything. After all,
the careers that are open to city-bred young men are very limited.
Practically for them there is not much beyond the counting-house and
the store. Farming, the great employment of the country, is repulsive
to them; and the ranks of the law are generally recruited from the
hard-headed and enterprising sons of farmers. But be the cause what
it may, there stands the fact that in the large American cities, and
of course nowhere to such an extent as in New York, there is to be
found a large class of young men of very limited means, who are living
dissipated lives, and whose great aim is to appear fashionable—a
detestable word, and a vulgar and unmanly idea, of which we in the old
country have not heard much since the times of the Regency.
The case of the women who fail in life is more sad than that of the
men, because, while they have less control over their own destinies,
the failure in establishing a happy home is to them the failure of
everything. The impracticable theory of social equality, I was again
led to believe, was frequently the cause of such failures. These young
women have been brought up in precisely the same way as their more
fortunate sisters, at the same or at similar schools. This makes, in
after life, the distinctions that meet the eye—of dress, equipage, and
position—enter like iron into the soul; and so the determination to
appear as others do becomes the rock upon which the happiness of many
is wrecked.
These, however, are matters upon which a stranger will be very
distrustful of his own observation, and will always hold himself open
to correction from those upon the phenomena of whose social life he is
commenting.
[Sidenote: _The Hub of the World._]
I will append to the foregoing remarks on the way in which many young
persons in American cities make a wreck of their life’s chances, an
outline of the course I observed many families ran in America. The
son of a farmer, we will say in Massachusetts, has some ambition.
There is no field for ambition in New England farming. He therefore
goes to Boston, or some commercial town, and becomes a lawyer, or a
merchant, or a professional man of some kind or other. He rises to
wealth and distinction, which are not so often secured by the city-born
as by those who have the energy and vigour of new blood fresh from
the country. He leaves his family well off. They never go back to the
country. If any of the children have the energy and vigour of the
father, they do not enter into business in Boston, but go out to the
west, and help to build up such places as Chicago and Omaha. But if,
as is generally the case, they have not energy and vigour enough for
this, they go to New York, or some large city, where refined society
and amusements are to be had. Some travel much, and take life easily.
Some occasionally enter into political life. They marry city ladies,
who are possessed of great refinement, but have very bad constitutions.
They have two or three children with long thin fingers and weak spines.
There is no fourth generation.
An Englishman cannot feel towards Americans as he does towards Italians
or Frenchmen. Wherever in America he sees a piece of land being
cleared and settled, or a church or a school being built, he looks on
as if something were being done by and for his own countrymen. There
is, however, one thing the evil effects of which he regrets to see
everywhere, and that is the restrictions by which his American brethren
are everywhere limiting trade and production. As he goes through
their vast continent, and visits region after region, each capable
of producing some different commodity the world needs, in sufficient
quantities for the wants of all civilised nations, he rejoices at the
greatness of their prospects, at the contemplation of all the wealth
that God has given them. And he feels certain that the day cannot
be very distant when they themselves will make the discovery that a
dollar’s worth of wheat, or maize, or cotton, or tobacco, or pork—and,
when the plains shall be turned to account, of beef, or mutton, or
wool—is exactly equal in value to a dollar’s worth of manufactured
goods, and two dollars’ worth is exactly twice the value, and a hundred
dollars’ worth is of exactly a hundred times the value. And that when
they shall have made this discovery they will strike off the fetters
from trade and production, and by a single vote of their legislature
increase the national wealth no one can foresee how many fold; and thus
make themselves, what their vast and all-producing country, commanding
both oceans and placed midway between Europe and Asia, is only waiting
to become—the hub of the world.