VELOCIPEDAL.
How mixed Blood effervesces.—Of the Causes and Developments of
American Fastness.—Unrest in Prisons and at Home.—Time lost in
Sleep, etc.—The distressing Hurry of Brains.—Compressing a Cow in
a Milk-Pot.—Of Doctors’ Gigs and Apoplectic Whirligigs.—American
Stomachs considered.—A general Stomach; how employed and hired
out.—Doctors’ Bills.—Clothes Wringers and State Wringers.—“Speedy
Trials” secured.—The Common and Un-common Law of the United States
considered at length.—Of Dower, and how taken.—Property
administered before Death.—Heirs cheated.—Injunctions
used.—Illinois Divorces.—Of Prohibited Degrees of Marriage.—Of Fat
People and Servants.—Boarding-Houses and Hotels.—American Trade
and its Feats at diminishing Quantities.—Fast Americans in
Europe.—How they overcome Distances, History, and Landlords.—The
Paris _Genus_.
If “in the midst of life we are in debt,” so in the midst of debt
Americans are always lively. Mixed blood seems to discharge rapidly its
effervescing ingredients.
Fastness, except in the colors of our cheeks and chintzes and in the
movement of our mails, works its curious ways through all manifestations
of American civilization. Over a small, old, long-cultivated territory,
like most of the European, life moves respectably slow, careful of its
savings, gathered up by centuries of work and put out at low rates of
interest; across continental stretches like ours, sweeping in wide
districts and materials of unbundled, aching plenty, it hastens with
panting speed, and can afford to lose everything except time. Our great
areas, therefore, make us lively, their vast opportunities, restless,
wide-talking, and manifesting the generous coarseness of a large-grained
breadth. Out of these alone would come marked characteristics; but when
these are further quickened by accelerating activities of discovery in
all departments, and by mechanical inventions of vast power in
translating man and his products over the earth, the result is rapid
brain-work, stimulating action, quick combinations, eruptive and
vivacious speech.
M. Varet, a French savan, has ascertained that a fly caught by him in
France made three hundred and thirty movements of his wings in a second.
This is rapid work; but a Wall Street bull will toss his horns twice as
fast.
The larger trains of thought thus started will run of themselves with
time-table exactness. We shall only accompany a few special excursion
ideas a short distance from the main depot.
An impatient unrest under discipline and restrictions, while kept below
fever heat by the wet bandages of a self-imposed law, makes jails double
punishments for American criminals, and homes often houses for the
detention of juveniles under sixteen. Confinements, except to a small
class of our married population, is an abridgment of enterprising work,
which, if continued beyond a natural law that prescribes sleep to all
and a longer period of inactivity to the special class just named, would
be a grievance, calling at least for a convention, addresses, and
agitation to get rid of.
The distress of hurry which vexes the _vis inertiæ_ out of our brains,
stirs our intellectual pans continually, so that we do not always get
the natural cream of ideas. An American is always working for condensed
milk processes; to compress a cow into a milk-pot, or utilize all the
herds in his neighborhood on his breakfast-table, in a way unheard of
elsewhere. Of course this wide-reaching hurry, which grasps large
results and scorns the domestic economies, that occupy the thoughts of
people elsewhere, refuses to be concerned for any length of time with
the importunities of suffering stomachs.
American stomachs have not time enough to wait on nature. Hence doctors’
gigs and apoplectic whirligigs. A patent stomach that should grind grist
for a neighborhood or village, and leave the unstomached worker to avail
himself of his accelerating opportunities, would command a high price.
It would be hired out around the neighborhood, like a threshing-machine
or corn-sheller. In fact, American households might in general be
advantageously grouped around or framed into one of these mechanical
digesters, with attachments for washing out, ironing, and starching
their clothes, and for doing up the wasteful processes of visiting, to
economic advantages that would tell on the census. One of the
disadvantages would be the discouragement of that branch of American
industry, now so largely prosperous, of doctors’ bills, chasing in vain
after many of the living and at last only overtaking the administrator
of the estate, clean out of breath.
Of course, the benefits of associated wealth and skill have not been
overlooked as levers to move enterprises, people’s purses, and sometimes
those low-down, coarse adjectives, volcanic in their origin, which, in
case of dissatisfaction, erupt over the surface. Universal
clothes-wringers are the product of this observation. So other
combinations have been and are rapidly forming to wring money out of
city, State, and Federal exchequers. It is curious to see how the
handles of these joint pumping and pocket-exhausting companies all lie
towards the great cities.
Most of the business in the United States, north of Washington, is
carried on after an express and accelerated fashion, which is impatient
of holidays, and rides over the Fourth of July even, as ruthlessly as an
express-train over the human obstruction which thus gets forwarded on
his journey out of the United States with a despatch almost enviable to
the survivors. Even the Federal Constitution prescribes “speedy trials”
as a right, and treats a man as injured who does not go it in a capital
way, when on that precipitous road, with a final rush.
The common law of the United States presumes that all are minute-men,
and know the quick step; while the uncommon law in Wyoming, Idaho,
Nevada, and Colorado dispenses with the tedious confinement between the
apprehension of the accused and his transporting sentence and uprising.
“Delays are dangerous,” is their condensed code.
[Illustration:
MEMBERS OF CONGRESS IN A. D. 1900.
(p. 520)
]
The law of dower, as practically enforced, is shaped by the same rapidly
revolving lathe, which makes so much of our domestic hollow-ware. The
wife spends the principal before her husband’s death, and thus shuns the
tedious complications of legal proceedings, which admeasures the dower
often to the enterpising lawyer, the bailiffs, and the court clerks.
A marked improvement has also been made in the distribution of estates
generally. Among the slow nations of Europe the children generally wait
for the unfortunate old people to die before taking their property. This
tardy habit is now found to be often productive of great injury to
children, especially to those who, snatched away by rapid manners before
their begettors, are thus defrauded of their shares. “A bird in the
hand” is no longer a _rara avis_, but a domestic fowl cultivated by
rapid feeding. Gifts to the living avoid the taxes and discomforts of
probate courts, in which it is disagreeable for a family, covered with
crape, to sit and see a politician assess the estate upon the heirs.
Fast progress has been made, also, in preventive justice. Injunctions,
behind whose shields such old fogies as Lord Eldon, Lord Somers, Lord
Thurlow, John Marshall, or William Story were accustomed to hide
threatened rights until the danger was over-past, have recently been
turned edgewise, and cut down corporations and others obnoxious
Fisc-ally or otherwise, or else pressed against them so that they
perspired away their adipose stock until they were comfortably ready for
a receiver.
The doctrine of divorce, which has puzzled the learned John Miltons in
all the sleepy ages that have dozed before us, has been, in many States,
simplified, so that he who runs through them may read a decree. Some
people have uncharitably supposed that the premiums offered to
individual disunions by such States as Illinois and Indiana, were
devices to draw speculators thither for a day or so; but these are
vagrant suspicions that ought not to be allowed on our trains.
In feudal countries, where purity of blood is carefully
guarded,—inasmuch as the descents to property are the rule and not
descents from it as in America,—legists declare that a woman may not
marry her cousin, her uncle, her grandfather, or even her father,—a wise
enough restriction, perhaps, for such benighted folks, and where care in
marrying often leaves the female part of the household to the dangerous
company of these relations until far on in life. But with us women are
not shut up to any such necessities, except in Utah, where they may, in
the course of a respectably long life, marry through every genealogical
degree without knowing it. In other parts they are as necessary as
insurance companies, and so marry very soon; so that silver weddings are
often seen at an early age, while golden matrimonies are more frequent
than maternities or patrimonies. To every thoughtful man, who moves
about our rapidly dissolving surfaces, where the railroad car is the
kaleidoscope which turns up the bits of humanity in new combinations, a
wife is necessary to put up a monument over him; for moving on is such a
fixed law,—the only fixed thing in America, except debt and live
corruption,—that while he was turning his majority, all his family
relations would have gone to other States.
The two curiosities in the United States are fat people and servants.
Both run away in a velocipedal hurry; the former into sharp bargains,
and the latter into independent powers which dictate treaties and make
alliances like other self-governing communities. An American family is
like a South Carolina regiment, all officers and no privates; a
boarding-house, a Swiss confederacy, in which the cantons, wedged into
neutralizing elements, get forward like a stool braced every-way and
equipoised into an aching discomfort; and a hotel, like twenty German
_Bunds_ entangled by contrarious independent interests that knot
themselves into teasing discontents, and fret into jars which hold a
variety of unpreserved, acidulating fruits. The freest joke in all
America is one of its large hotels, which fancies Axminster carpets and
chandeliers in a large parlor, and numerous discomforts packed in
ever-dwindling rooms, to be happiness. But then the “gentlemanly
proprietor” makes up for all this in the bills, which convince all the
guests, that they must have enjoyed themselves and at an American rate
of speed.
Trade has also had its great advances, not only in the figures which
stand in merchants’ magazines like pyramids, with bases always widening
downwards, but in the dwindling measures, quarts, gallons, pecks, and
bushels, and the waning qualities which sharpen upwards to steady
apexes. How to make up in the bill what is taken from the body is a
critical study, in which most tradesmen have, without any prizes offered
by outsiders, become great proficients. If that man is a public
benefactor who makes two blades grow in the place of one, surely he may
be rewarded with a passing notice, who takes all the steel out of the
one sent to him for repairs, and then divides up the instrument into
several blades. Making water into wine, chalk into milk, chemicals into
as many varieties of drinkables as there are days of the year, and
diluting articles deemed too strong when left to their raw native vigor,
so as to adapt them to our weakened constitutions, attest the beneficent
designs of manufacturers and merchants upon Americans of plethoric
habits. Peabodies shelling out to poorbodies furnish examples of
abundant charity not so widely touching as these.
To make a small measure go twice as far as a large one is more than a
feat; it approaches creation. What may in time be considered a double
bed, it is impossible yet to foresee; but certain it is, that while
single beds are increasing to an alarmingly wide extent, their
narrowness is becoming such as to require a new definition of a line to
avoid disagreeable collisions.
Mercantile failures, elsewhere hurtful, are with us hurried on into
vivacious benefits, dividing up, before the expiration of the credits
given, the accumulated profits which otherwise might accumulate in
stagnating dulness in the firm. A steady increase of wages is solving,
too, those perplexing theories how to balance capital and labor; a
weekly distribution of earnings keeping down injudicious balances in the
bank.
The frequent jumps of men from low places into high ones, with a
celerity very pleasing to their families and often to their creditors,
show that the world is governed too much; for acting on this
Jeffersonian maxim, most of these ready leapers leave off the governing
part and expend their activities in securing, along with their weak
salaries, strong flying benefits, which only light on the vigilant.
While the velocipedal ways of Americans thus cut across their own
country, it is in foreign fields that they are most striking and
cutting. Crossing the well-worn paths of Europe, scattering high-premium
gold on those jolly fellows, landlords and waiters, they ridge its old
historic surfaces with little histories which the facetious persons, who
catch sight of them as they whiz through histories, which they leave
grandly behind them and all unknown, retail with as much glee, as the
travellers themselves once did saleratus, fine-cut nails, or bobinet.
Their scant intellectual stores and unfurnished stock of knowledge, so
far from embarrassing, only enable them to spin on faster. Mythology,
paintings, biographies, architecture, are soon wound up on their clean
spindles.
Another class, like aeronautic vessels, have gaseous heads and heavy
undergearing, which enable them to run over and run down everything
abroad by swift-moving slangs. They always float by the bad air of their
own heads, and are apt to anchor in vicious soils. These they can-can.
The spent money surprises the hotel squeezers; the spent morals astonish
themselves by the ease with which they lose their little all.
But of all the fast classes in America, that is the most velocipedal
which, having expressed themselves through the modish follies of the
largest American cities, are transported to the stronger vices of Paris.
Tired of tapping the younger trees of American growth, they spend the
rest of their precious lives in pecking assiduously the rotten parts of
foreign woods, content with the phosphoric slime of decay and dissolving
maturities.