I think this treatment is best for the greatest number of those who
visit the place, and for whom the aspect of simple nature is the
thing to be desired. Their pleasure in it, as far as the children are
concerned, is visible and audible enough, but I like, as I stroll
along, to note the quiet comfort which the elder people take in this
domain of theirs, as they sit on the benches in the woodland ways,
or under the arching trees of the Mall, unmolested by the company of
some of the worst of all the bad statues in the world. They are mostly
foreigners, I believe, but I find every now and then an American among
them, who has released himself, or has been forced by want of work,
to share their leisure for the time; I fancy he has always a bad
conscience, if he is taking the time off, from the continual pressure
of our duty to add dollar to dollar, and provide for the future as
well as the present need. The foreigner, who has been bred up without
the American’s hope of advancement, has not his anxiety, and is a
happier man, so far as that goes; but the Park imparts something of its
peace to every one, even to some of the people who drive, and form a
spectacle for those who walk.
For me they all unite to form a spectacle I never cease to marvel at,
with a perpetual hunger of conjecture as to what they really think of
one another. Apparently, they are all, whether they walk or whether
they drive, willing collectively, if not individually, to go on forever
in the economy which perpetuates their inequality, and makes a mock of
the polity which assures them their liberty. The difference which money
creates among men is always preposterous, and whenever I take my eyes
from it the thing ceases to be credible; yet this difference is what
the vast majority of Americans have agreed to accept forever as right
and justice. If I were to go and sit beside some poor man in the Park,
and ask him why a man no better than he was driving before him in a
luxurious carriage, he would say that the other man had the money to
do it; and he would really think he had given me a reason; the man in
the carriage himself could not regard the answer as more full and final
than the man on the bench. They have both been reared in the belief
that it is a sufficient answer, and they would both regard me with the
same misgiving if I ventured to say that it was not a reason; for if
their positions were to be at once reversed, they would both acquiesce
in the moral outlawry of their inequality. The man on foot would think
it had simply come his turn to drive in a carriage, and the man whom
he ousted would think it was rather hard luck, but he would realize
that it was what, at the bottom of his heart, he had always expected.
Only once have I happened to find any one who questioned the situation
from a standpoint outside of it, and that was a shabbily dressed man
whom I overheard talking to a poor woman in one of those pleasant
arbors which crown certain points of rising ground in the Park. She
had a paper bundle on the seat beside her, and she looked like some
working-woman out of place, with that hapless, wistful air which such
people often have. Her poor little hands, which lay in her lap, were
stiffened and hardened with work, but they were clean, except for
the black of the nails, and she was very decently clad in garments
beginning to fray into rags; she had a good, kind, faithful face, and
she listened without rancor to the man as he unfolded the truth to her
concerning the conditions in which they lived. It was the wisdom of the
poor, hopeless, joyless, as it now and then makes itself heard in the
process of the years and ages, and then sinks again into silence. He
showed her how she had no permanent place in the economy, not because
she had momentarily lost work, but because in the nature of things
as we have them, it could only be a question of time when she must be
thrown out of any place she found. He blamed no one; he only blamed
the conditions. I doubt whether his wisdom made the friendless woman
happier, but I could not have gainsaid it, when he saw me listening, if
he had asked, “Isn’t that the truth?” I left him talking sadly on, and
I never saw him again. He was threadbare, but he too was cleanly and
decent in his dress, and not at all of that type of agitators of whom
we have made an effigy like nothing I have seen, as if merely for the
childish pleasure of reviling it.