THE EMPIRE STATE.
At the far southeast of New York City, where the Hudson and East River
meet to form the inner bay, is an ill-kept park that might be made the
loveliest garden in the world. Nowhere do the features that have caused
New York to take rank as the first port of America stand forth more
clearly. The soft evening breeze tells of a climate as good as the world
can show; the setting sun floods with light a harbor secure and vast,
formed by the confluence of noble streams, and girt with quays at which
huge ships jostle; the rows of 500-pounder Rodmans at “The Narrows” are
tokens of the nation‘s strength and wealth; and the yachts, as well
handled as our own, racing into port from an ocean regatta, give
evidence that there are Saxons in the land. At the back is the city,
teeming with life, humming with trade, muttering with the thunder of
passage. Opposite, in Jersey City, people say: “Every New Yorker has
come a good half-hour late into the world, and is trying all his life to
make it up.” The bustle is immense.
All is so un-English, so foreign, that hearing men speaking what Czar
Nicholas was used to call “the American tongue,” I wheel round,
crying--“Dear me! if here are not some English folk!” astonished as
though I had heard French in Australia or Italian in Timbuctoo.
The Englishman who, coming to America, expects to find cities that smell
of home, soon learns that Baker Street itself, or Portland Place, would
not look English in the dry air of a continent four thousand miles
across. New York, however, is still less English than is Boston,
Philadelphia, or Chicago--her people are as little Saxon as her streets.
Once Southern, with the brand of slavery deeply printed in the foreheads
of her foremost men, since the defeat of the rebellion New York has to
the eye been cosmopolitan as any city of the Levant. All nationless
towns are not alike: Alexandria has a Greek or an Italian tinge; San
Francisco an English tone, with something of the heartiness of our
Elizabethan times; New York has a deep Latin shade, and the democracy of
the Empire State is of the French, not of the American or English type.
At the back, here, on the city side, are tall gaunt houses, painted red,
like those of the quay at Dort or of the Boompjes at Rotterdam, the
former dwellings of the “Knickerbockers” of New Amsterdam, the founders
of New York, but now forgotten. There may be a few square yards of
painting, red or blue, upon the houses in Broadway; there may be here
and there a pagoda summer-house overhanging a canal; once in a year you
may run across a worthy descendant of the old Netherlandish families;
but in the main the Hollanders in America are as though they had never
been; to find the memorials of lost Dutch empire, we must search Cape
Colony or Ceylon. The New York un-English tone is not Batavian. Neither
the sons of the men who once lived in these houses, nor the Germans
whose names are now upon the doors, nor, for the matter of that, we
English, who claim New York as the second of our towns, are the to-day‘s
New Yorkers.
Here, on the water‘s edge, is a rickety hall, where Jenny Lind sang when
first she landed--now the spot where strangers of another kind are
welcomed to America. Every true republican has in his heart the notion
that his country is pointed out by God for a refuge for the distressed
of all the nations. He has sprung himself from men who came to seek a
sanctuary--from the Quakers, or the Catholics, or the pilgrims of the
_Mayflower_. Even though they come to take the bread from his mouth, or
to destroy his peace, it is his duty, he believes, to aid the
immigrants. Within the last twenty years there have landed at New York
alone four million strangers. Of these two-thirds were Irish.
While the Celtic men are pouring into New York and Boston, the New
Englanders and New Yorkers, too, are moving. They are not dying. Facts
are opposed to this portentous theory. They are going West. The unrest
of the Celt is mainly caused by discontent with his country‘s present,
that of the Saxon by hope for his private future. The Irishman flies to
New York because it lies away from Ireland; the Englishman takes it upon
his road to California.
Where one race is dominant, immigrants of another blood soon lose their
nationality. In New York and Boston the Irish continue to be Celts, for
these are Irish cities. In Pittsburg, in Chicago, still more in the
country districts, a few years make the veriest Paddy English. On the
other hand, the Saxons are disappearing from the Atlantic cities, as the
Spaniards have gone from Mexico. The Irish here are beating down the
English, as the English have crushed out the Dutch. The Hollander‘s
descendants in New York are English now; it bids fair that the Saxons
should be Irish.
As it is, though the Celtic immigration has lasted only twenty years,
the results are already clear: if you see a Saxon face upon the
Broadway, you may be sure it belongs to a traveler, or to some raw
English lad bound West, just landed from a Plymouth ship. We need not
lay much stress upon the fact that all New Yorkers have black hair and
beard: men may be swarthy and yet English. The ancestors of the
Londoners of to-day, we are told, were yellow-headed roysterers; yet not
one man in fifty that you meet in Fleet Street or on Tower Hill is as
fair as the average Saxon peasant. Doubtless, our English eastern
counties were peopled in the main by low-Dutch and Flemings: the Sussex
eyes and hair are rarely seen in Suffolk. The Puritans of New England
are sprung from those of the “associated counties,” but the victors of
Marston Moor may have been cousins to those no less sturdy Protestants,
the Hollanders who defended Leyden. It may be that they were our
ancestors, those Dutchmen that we English crowded out of New
Amsterdam--the very place where we are sharing the fate we dealt. The
fiery temper of the new people of the American coast towns, their
impatience of free government, are better proofs of Celtic blood than
are the color of their eyes and beard.
Year by year the towns grow more and more intensely Irish. Already of
every four births in Boston, one only is American. There are 120,000
foreign to 70,000 native voters in New York and Brooklyn. Montreal and
Richmond are fast becoming Celtic; Philadelphia--shades of Penn!--can
only be saved by the aid of its Bavarians. Saxon Protestantism is
departing with the Saxons: the revenues of the Empire State are spent
upon Catholic asylums; plots of city land are sold at nominal rates for
the sites of Catholic cathedrals, by the “city _step_-fathers,” as they
are called. Not even in the West does the Latin Church gain ground more
rapidly than in New York City: there are 80,000 professing Catholics in
Boston.
When is this drama, of which the first scene is played in Castle Garden,
to have its close? The matter is grave enough already. Ten years ago,
the third and fourth cities of the world, New York and Philadelphia,
were as English as our London: the one is Irish now; the other all but
German. Not that the Quaker City will remain Teutonic: the Germans, too,
are going out upon the land; the Irish alone pour in unceasingly. All
great American towns will soon be Celtic, while the country continues
English: a fierce and easily-roused people will throng the cities, while
the law-abiding Saxons who till the land will cease to rule it. Our
relations with America are matters of small moment by the side of the
one great question: Who are the Americans to be?
Our kinsmen are by no means blind to the dangers that hang over them.
The “Know-Nothing” movement failed, but Protection speaks the same voice
in its opposition to commercial centers. If you ask a Western man why
he, whose interest is clearly in Free Trade, should advocate Protection,
he fires out: “Free Trade is good for our American pockets, but it‘s
death to us Americans. All your Bastiats and Mills won‘t touch the fact
that to us Free Trade must mean salt-water despotism, and the ascendency
of New York and Boston. Which is better for the country--one New York,
or ten contented Pittsburgs and ten industrious Lowells?”
The danger to our race and to the world from Irish ascendency is perhaps
less imminent than that to the republic. In January, 1862, the mayor,
Fernando Wood, the elect of the “Mozart” Democracy, deliberately
proposed the secession from the Union of New York City. Of all the
Northern States, New York alone was a dead weight upon the loyal people
during the war of the rebellion. The constituents of Wood were the very
Fenians whom in our ignorance we call “American.” It is America that
Fenianism invades from Ireland--not England from America.
It is no unfair attack upon the Irish to represent them as somewhat
dangerous inhabitants for mighty cities. Of the sixty thousand persons
arrested yearly in New York, three-fourths are alien born: two-thirds of
these are Irish. Nowhere else in all America are the Celts at present
masters of a city government--nowhere is there such corruption. The
purity of the government of Melbourne--a city more democratic than New
York--proves that the fault does not lie in democracy: it is the
universal opinion of Americans that the Irish are alone responsible.
The State legislature is falling into the hands of the men who control
the city council. They tell a story of a traveler on the Hudson River
Railroad, who, as the train neared Albany--the capital of New York--said
to a somewhat gloomy neighbor, “Going to the State legislatur’?” getting
for answer, “No, sir! It‘s not come to that with me yet. Only to the
State prison!”
Americans are never slow to ridicule the denationalization of New York.
They tell you that during the war the colonel of one of the city
regiments said: “I‘ve the best blood of eight nations in the ranks.”
“How‘s that?” “I‘ve English, Irish, Welsh, Scotch, French, Italians,
Germans.” “Guess that‘s only seven.” “Swedes,” suggested some one. “No,
no Swedes,” said the colonel. “Ah! I have it: I‘ve some Americans.”
Stories such as this the rich New Yorkers are nothing loth to tell; but
they take no steps to check the denationalization they lament. Instead
of entering upon a reform of their municipal institutions, they affect
to despise free government; instead of giving, as the oldest New England
families have done, their tone to the State schools, they keep entirely
aloof from school and State alike. Sending their boys to Cambridge,
Berlin, Heidelberg, anywhere rather than to the colleges of their native
land, they leave it to learned pious Boston to supply the West with
teachers, and to keep up Yale and Harvard. Indignant if they are pointed
at as “no Americans,” they seem to separate themselves from everything
that is American: they spend summers in England, winters in Algeria,
springs in Rome, and Coloradans say with a sneer, “Good New Yorkers go
to Paris when they die.”
Apart from nationality, there is danger to free government both in the
growth of New York City, and in the gigantic fortunes of New Yorkers.
The income, they tell me, of one of my merchant friends is larger than
the combined salaries of the president, the governors, and the whole of
the members of the legislatures of all the forty-five States and
territories. As my informant said, “He could keep the governments of
half a dozen States as easily as I can support my half dozen children.”
There is something, no doubt, of the exaggeration of political jealousy
about the accounts of New York vice given in New England and down
South, in the shape of terrible philippics. It is to be hoped that the
overstatement is enormous, for sober men are to be found even in New
York who will tell you that this city outdoes Paris in every form of
profligacy as completely as the French capital outherods imperial Rome.
There is here no concealment about the matter; each inhabitant at once
admits the truth of accusations directed against his neighbor. If the
new men, the “petroleum aristocracy,” are second to none in their
denunciations of the Irish, these in their turn unite with the oldest
families in thundering against “Shoddy.”
New York life shows but badly in the summer-time; it is seen at its
worst when studied at Saratoga. With ourselves, men have hardly ceased
to run from business and pleasures worse than toil to the comparative
quiet of the country house. Among New Yorkers there is not even the
affectation of a search for rest; the flight is from the drives and
restaurants of New York to the gambling halls of Saratoga; from winning
piles of greenbacks to losing heaps of gold; from cotton gambling to
roulette or faro. Long Branch is still more vulgar in its vice; it is
the Margate, Saratoga the Homburg of America.
“Shoddy” is blamed beyond what it deserves when the follies of New York
society are laid in a body at its door. If it be true that the New York
drawing-rooms are the best guarded in the world, it is also true that
entrance is denied as rigidly to intellect and eminence as to wealth. If
exclusiveness be needed, affectation can at least do nothing toward
subduing “Shoddy.” Mere cliqueism, disgusting every where, is ridiculous
in a democratic town; its rules of conduct are as out of place as kid
gloves in the New Zealand bush, or gold scabbards on a battle-field.
Good meat, and drink, and air, give strength to the men and beauty to
the women of a moneyed class; but in America these things are the
inheritance of every boy and girl, and give their owners no advantage in
the world. During the rebellion, the ablest generals and bravest
soldiers of the North sprang, not from the merchant families, but from
the farmer folk. Without special merit of some kind, there can be no
such thing as aristocracy.
Many American men and women, who have too little nobility of soul to be
patriots, and too little understanding to see that theirs is already, in
many points, the master country of the globe, come to you, and bewail
the fate which has caused them to be born citizens of a republic, and
dwellers in a country where men call vices by their names. The least
educated of their countrymen, the only grossly vulgar class that America
brings forth, they fly to Europe “to escape democracy,” and pass their
lives in Paris, Pau, or Nice, living libels on the country they are
believed to represent.
Out of these discordant elements, Cubans, Knickerbockers, Germans,
Irish, “first families,” “Petroleum,” and “Shoddy,” we are forced to
construct our composite idea--New York. The Irish numerically
predominate, but we have no experience as to what should be the moral
features of an Irish city, for Dublin has always been in English hands;
possibly that which in New York appears to be cosmopolitan is merely
Celtic. However it may be, this much is clear, that the humblest
township of New England reflects more truly the America of the past, the
most chaotic village of Nebraska portrays more fully the hopes and
tendencies of the America of the future, than do this huge State and
city.
If the political figure of New York is not encouraging, its natural
beauty is singularly great. Those who say that America has no scenery,
forget the Hudson, while they can never have explored Lake George, Lake
Champlain, and the Mohawk. That Poole‘s exquisite scene from the
“Decameron,” “Philomela‘s Song,” could have been realized on earth, I
never dreamt until I saw the singers at a New Yorker‘s villa on the
Hudson grouped in the deep shades of a glen, from which there was an
outlook upon the basaltic palisades and lake-like Tappan Zee. It was in
some such spot that De Tocqueville wrote the brightest of his brilliant
letters--that dated “Sing Sing”--for he speaks of himself as lying on a
hill that overhung the Hudson, watching the white sails gleaming in the
hot sun, and trying in vain to fancy what became of the river where it
disappeared in the blue “Highlands.”
That New York City itself is full of beauty the view from Castle Garden
would suffice to show; and by night it is not less lovely than by day.
The harbor is illuminated by the colored lanterns of a thousand boats,
and the steam-whistles tell of a life that never sleeps. The paddles of
the steamers seem not only to beat the water, but to stir the languid
air and so provoke a breeze, and the lime-lights at the Fulton and Wall
Street ferries burn so brightly that in the warm glare the eye reaches
through the still night to the feathery acacias in the streets of
Brooklyn. The view is as southern as the people: we have not yet found
America.