I
In crossing the Atlantic from the New World to the Old, one of the first
intimations the traveler has that he is nearing a strange shore, and an
old and populous one, is the greater boldness and familiarity of the
swarms of sea-gulls that begin to hover in the wake of the ship, and
dive and contend with each other for the fragments and parings thrown
overboard from the pantry. They have at once a different air and manner
from those we left behind. How bold and tireless they are, pursuing the
vessel from dawn to dark, and coming almost near enough to take the food
out of your hand as you lean over the bulwarks. It is a sign in the air;
it tells the whole story of the hungry and populous countries you are
approaching; it is swarming and omnivorous Europe come out to meet you.
You are near the sea-marge of a land teeming with life, a land where the
prevailing forms are indeed few, but these on the most copious and
vehement scale; where the birds and animals are not only more numerous
than at home, but more dominating and aggressive, more closely
associated with man, contending with him for the fruits of the soil,
learned in his ways, full of resources, prolific, tenacious of life, not
easily checked or driven out,--in fact, characterized by greater
persistence and fecundity. This fact is sure, sooner or later, to strike
the American in Britain. There seems to be an aboriginal push and heat
in animate nature there, to behold which is a new experience. It is the
Old World, and yet it really seems the New in the virility and hardihood
of its species.
The New Englander who sees with evil forebodings the rapid falling off
of the birth-rate in his own land, the family rills shrinking in these
later generations, like his native streams in summer, and who
consequently fears for the perpetuity of the race, may see something to
comfort him in the British islands. Behold the fecundity of the parent
stock! The drought that has fallen upon the older parts of the New World
does not seem to have affected the sources of being in these islands.
They are apparently as copious and exhaustless as they were three
centuries ago. Britain might well appropriate to herself the last half
of Emerson's quatrain:--
"No numbers have counted my tallies,
No tribes my house can fill;
I sit by the shining Fount of Life,
And pour the deluge still."
For it is literally a deluge; the land is inundated with humanity.
Thirty millions of people within the area of one of our larger States,
and who shall say that high-water mark is yet reached? Everything
betokens a race still in its youth, still on the road to empire. The
full-bloodedness, the large feet and hands, the prominent canine teeth,
the stomachic and muscular robustness, the health of the women, the
savage jealousy of personal rights, the swarms upon swarms of children
and young people, the delight in the open air and in athletic sports,
the love of danger and adventure, a certain morning freshness and
youthfulness in their look, as if their food and sleep nourished them
well, together with a certain animality and stupidity,--all indicate a
people who have not yet slackened speed or taken in sail. Neither the
land nor the race shows any exhaustion. In both there is yet the
freshness and fruitfulness of a new country. You would think the people
had just come into possession of a virgin soil. There is a pioneer
hardiness and fertility about them. Families increase as in our early
frontier settlements. Let me quote a paragraph from Taine's "Notes:"--
"An Englishman nearly always has many children,--the rich as well as the
poor. The Queen has nine, and sets the example. Let us run over the
families we are acquainted with: Lord ---- has six children; the Marquis
of ----, twelve; Sir N----, nine; Mr. S----, a judge, twenty-four, of
whom twenty-two are living; several clergymen, five, six, and up to ten
and twelve."
Thus is the census kept up and increased. The land, the towns and
cities, are like hives in swarming time; a fertile queen indeed, and
plenty of brood-comb! Were it not for the wildernesses of America, of
Africa, and Australia, to which these swarms migrate, the people would
suffocate and trample each other out. A Scotch or English city, compared
with one of ours, is a kind of duplex or compound city; it has a double
interior,--the interior of the closes and alleys, in which and out of
which the people swarm like flies. Every country village has its closes,
its streets between streets, where the humbler portion of the population
is packed away. This back-door humanity streams forth to all parts of
the world, and carries the national virtues with it. In walking through
some of the older portions of Edinburgh, I was somehow reminded of
colonies of cliff swallows I had seen at home, packed beneath the eaves
of a farmer's barn, every inch of space occupied, the tenements crowding
and lapping over each other, the interstices filled, every coign of
vantage seized upon, the pendent beds and procreant cradles ranked one
above another, and showing all manner of quaint and ingenious forms and
adaptability to circumstances. In both London and Edinburgh there are
streets above streets, or huge viaducts that carry one torrent of
humanity above another torrent. They utilize the hills and depressions
to make more surface room for their swarming myriads.
One day, in my walk through the Trosachs in the Highlands, I came upon a
couple of ant-hills that arrested my attention. They were a type of the
country. They were not large, scarcely larger than a peck measure, but
never before had I seen ant-hills so populous and so lively. They were
living masses of ants, while the ground for yards about literally
rustled with their numbers. I knew ant-hills at home, and had noted them
carefully, hills that would fill a cart-box; but they were like empty
tenements compared with these, a fort garrisoned with a company instead
of an army corps. These hills stood in thin woods by the roadside. From
each of them radiated five main highways, like the spokes of a wheel.
These highways were clearly defined to the eye, the grass and leaves
being slightly beaten down. Along each one of them there was a double
line of ants,--one line going out for supplies and the other returning
with booty,--worms, flies, insects, a constant stream of game going into
the capitol. If the ants, with any given worm or bug, got stuck, those
passing out would turn and lend a helping hand. The ground between the
main highways was being threaded in all directions by individual ants,
beating up and down for game. The same was true of the surface all about
the terminus of the roads, several yards distant. If I stood a few
moments in one place, the ants would begin to climb up my shoes and so
up my legs. Stamping them off seemed only to alarm and enrage the whole
camp, so that I would presently be compelled to retreat. Seeing a big
straddling beetle, I caught him and dropped him upon the nest. The ants
attacked him as wolves might attack an elephant. They clung to his
legs, they mounted his back, and assaulted him in front. As he rushed
through and over their ranks, down the side of the mound, those clinging
to his legs were caught hold of by others, till lines of four or five
ants were being jerked along by each of his six legs. The infuriated
beetle cleared the mound, and crawled under leaves and sticks to sweep
off his clinging enemies, and finally seemed to escape them by burying
himself in the earth. Then I took one of those large, black, shelless
snails with which this land abounds, a snail the size of my thumb, and
dropped it upon the nest. The ants swarmed upon it at once, and began to
sink their jaws into it. This woke the snail up to the true situation,
and it showed itself not without resources against its enemies. Flee,
like the beetle, it could not, but it bore an invisible armor; it began
to excrete from every pore of its body a thick, whitish, viscid
substance, that tied every ant that came in contact with it, hand and
foot, in a twinkling. When a thick coating of this impromptu bird-lime
had been exuded, the snail wriggled right and left a few times, partly
sloughing it off, and thus ingulfing hundreds of its antagonists. Never
was army of ants or of men bound in such a Stygian quagmire before. New
phalanxes rushed up and tried to scale the mass; most of them were mired
like their fellows, but a few succeeded and gained the snail's back;
then began the preparation of another avalanche of glue; the creature
seemed to dwindle in size, and to nerve itself to the work; as fast as
the ants reached him in any number he ingulfed them; he poured the vials
of his glutinous wrath upon them till he had formed quite a rampart of
cemented and helpless ants about him; fresh ones constantly coming up
laid hold of the barricade with their jaws, and were often hung that
way. I lingered half an hour or more to see the issue, but was finally
compelled to come away before the closing scene. I presume the ants
finally triumphed. The snail had nearly exhausted its ammunition; each
new broadside took more and more time and was less and less effective;
while the ants had unlimited resources, and could make bridges of their
sunken armies. But how they finally freed themselves and their mound of
that viscid, sloughing monster I should be glad to know.
But it was not these incidents that impressed me so much as the numbers
and the animation of the ants, and their raiding, buccaneering
propensities. When I came to London, I could not help thinking of the
ant-hill I had seen in the North. This, I said, is the biggest ant-hill
yet. See the great steam highways, leading to all points of the compass;
see the myriads swarming, jostling each other in the streets, and
overflowing all the surrounding country. See the underground tunnels and
galleries and the overground viaducts; see the activity and the
supplies, the whole earth the hunting-ground of these insects and
rustling with their multitudinous stir. One may be pardoned, in the
presence of such an enormous aggregate of humanity as London shows, for
thinking of insects. Men and women seem cheapened and belittled, as if
the spawn of blow-flies had turned to human beings. How the throng
stream on interminably, the streets like river-beds, full to their
banks! One hardly notes the units,--he sees only the black tide. He
loses himself, and becomes an insignificant ant with the rest. He is
borne along through the galleries and passages to the underground
railway, and is swept forward like a drop in the sea. I used to make
frequent trips to the country, or seek out some empty nook in St.
Paul's, to come to my senses. But it requires no ordinary effort to find
one's self in St. Paul's, and in the country you must walk fast or
London will overtake you. When I would think I had a stretch of road all
to myself, a troop of London bicyclists would steal up behind me and
suddenly file by like spectres. The whole land is London-struck. You
feel the suction of the huge city wherever you are. It draws like a
cyclone; every current tends that way. It would seem as if cities and
towns were constantly breaking from their moorings and drifting
thitherward and joining themselves to it. On every side one finds
smaller cities welded fast. It spreads like a malignant growth, that
involves first one organ and then another. But it is not malignant. On
the contrary, it is perhaps as normal and legitimate a city as there is
on the globe. It is the proper outcome and expression of that fertile
and bountiful land, and that hardy, multiplying race. It seems less the
result of trade and commerce, and more the result of the domestic
home-seeking and home-building instinct, than any other city I have yet
seen. I felt, and yet feel, its attraction. It is such an aggregate of
actual human dwellings that this feeling pervades the very air. All its
vast and multiplex industries, and its traffic, seem domestic, like the
chores about the household. I used to get glimpses of it from the
northwest borders, from Hampstead Heath, and from about Highgate, lying
there in the broad, gentle valley of the Thames, like an enormous
country village--a village with nearly four million souls, where people
find life sweet and wholesome, and keep a rustic freshness of look and
sobriety of manner. See their vast parks and pleasure grounds; see the
upper Thames, of a bright Sunday, alive with rowing parties; see them
picnicking in all the country adjacent. Indeed, in summer a social and
even festive air broods over the whole vast encampment. There is squalor
and misery enough, of course, and too much, but this takes itself away
to holes and corners.