MANY Americans were good enough to call upon me before I had the
pleasure of visiting their country, and many Americans have called
since, and no American ever does me this honour without charging the
very atmosphere of my study with oxygen, and leaving an impression of
activity which quickens my slow pulses and almost reduces me to despair.
It is now several years ago that a tall, thin, alert man followed his
card into my study with such rapidity that I had barely time to read it
before my visitor was in the room.
“My name is Elijah K. Higgins, and I am a busy man. You are also busy
and have no time to fool away. Four days is all I can give to the United
Kingdom, and I wished to shake hands with you. Good-bye, I am off to
Drumtochty.”
I calculate that Mr. Higgins spent thirty seconds in my study, and left
the room so swiftly that I overtook him only at the front door. When I
asked him if he knew where Drumtochty was, “Guess I do!” he said. “Got
the route in my pocket, north-west from Perth, N.B.,” and in two seconds
more he was whirling away in a fast hansom. As I returned to my study
and imagined my visitor compassing Great Britain (I think he excluded
Ireland, but I am not certain) in four days, I was for a moment roused
from the state of comparative lethargy which we, in England, call work,
and added six more engagements to my afternoon's programme. For days
afterwards, and as often as I was tempted to rest in my chair, the
remembrance of that whirlwind gave me a shock of new vigour. Sometimes
a reaction would follow, and I humbly thanked Providence, although that
was to write myself a weakling and a sluggard, that I was not bom in the
country where Mr. Higgins lived and was at home.
Such lively experiences, which I often recall in jaded moments, prepare
one for a visit or a re-visit to America, as a tonic gives a sluggish
person an appetite for dinner, and it is bare justice to say that
one's expectations of American energy in its own home have not been
disappointed. If Americans, depressed by our heavy climate and our
leisurely life, could yet maintain such a level of thought and motion,
what might not be possible to them in their own country, where the
atmosphere is charged with electricity, and every second man is a
“hustler from way-back.” The stir of the New World affects the visitor
and quickens his pulses as he goes up the Hudson and gets his first
glimpse of New York. Your steamer had waited four hours at Queenstown
for the mails, but the same mails were transferred to the United States
tender as the steamer steams up the bay. Little tugs dart about on all
sides with feverish speed, and larger steamers pass with their upper
machinery indecently exposed, as if there had not been time, or it had
not been worth while, to cover it. Buildings of incredible height line
the shores, and suggest that the American nation, besides utilizing the
ground, proposes also to employ the heavens for commercial purposes. It
was, I think, a Texas paper which translated the austere saying, “_Per
aspera ad astra_,” into “the hustler gets to heaven,” and certain New
York builders seem now to be on the way. Whetted by this overture on the
river, one is ready for the full music of the city; and I wish to
pay the compliment with all honesty that New York, with the possible
exception of Chicago, is the activest and noisiest place I have ever
seen, or expect to see, in this present world. While an English merchant
saunters down to his office between nine and ten, a New York man rises
at half-past six in his suburb and is busy at work at eight o'clock. The
Englishman takes off an hour during the day for luncheon at his club,
while the American eats his meal in fifteen minutes. The Englishman
spends more than another hour at afternoon tea, and gossip with friends,
and sauntering about between his club and his office, while the American
packs every minute with work. The very walk of an English merchant,
slow, dignified, self-satisfied, and that of the American, rapid,
eager, anxious--the one looking as if time were of no importance nor
circumstances, and the other as if the loss of a minute might mean
ruin--are the visible indices to the character of the nations. It
is only yesterday that elevators were introduced into English city
buildings, and there are many London offices to which you still have to
make an Alpine ascent of four stairs; but a New Yorker regards a stair
as a survival of barbarism, and hardly knows how to use it. The higher
buildings have several sets of elevators, like the four tracks which
railways lay down to work the swift and slow traffic.
“Don't go in there,” my friend said, with whom I was going to lunch at
a club on the top floor of a many-storied New York building. “That's an
accommodation elevator; stops, you know, at every station. This is the
express for the top floor.”
“Would it have made much difference?” I said.
“Very nearly a minute,” as if the loss of the minute would have thrown
us back for the rest of the day.
No man goes slow if he has the chance of going fast, no man stops to
talk if he can talk walking, no man walks if he can ride in a trolley
car, no one goes in a trolley car if he can get a convenient railway,
and by-and-by no one will go by railway car if he can be shot through a
pneumatic tube. No one writes with his own hand if he can dictate to a
stenographer, no one dictates if he can telegraph, no one telegraphs if
he can telephone, and by-and-by, when the spirit of American invention
has brought wireless telegraphy into thorough condition, a man will
simply sit with his mouth at one hole and his ear at another, and do
business with the ends of the earth in a few seconds, which the same
machine will copy and preserve in letter books and ledgers. It is the
American's regret that at present he can do nothing with his feet while
he is listening at the telephone, but doubtless some employment will be
found for them in the coming age.
If a slow-witted and slow-moving Englishman desires a liberal education,
let him take a journey of a month on the steam cars in the United
States. No train in Europe travels as fast as certain American
expresses, and if other trains go slower it is a matter of thankfulness,
because they are less likely to kill passengers on level crossings, or
in the main streets of the city along which they take their way, and
cattle have more time to get off the unprotected tracks. As trains have
also a trick of jumping the rails, either through the rails spreading
or the eccentricity of the engine, both being instances of exuberant
national vitality, it is just as well that every express does not go at
the rate of the Empire State Express on the New York Central. Nowhere
in Europe can a traveller find stronger or handsomer cars, and they are
marvels of adaptability and convenience. There is a dining car, in
order that you may not lose time at a station, and also, which is not
unimportant, in order that you may be able to occupy your time with
something practical on the train. Of course, there is a smoking
compartment, where men can compare notes upon politics and business, and
be able to escape from idleness and themselves. The best expresses
have a reading car, where the American can pick up such morsels of
information from the magazines as he can contain between the interstices
of business. There is a desk where he can read his letters, and
a typewriter to answer them, for this train is the American's
sleep-ing-place and dining-place, and his home and his office. One thing
only he regrets; the train, as it flies along, is not connected with
the telegraph and the telephone, so that, as an idea occurs to him or
he obtains a hint from a man in the smoking car, he might be able to do
business with his correspondents in Chicago or San Francisco. While
an Englishman on a railway journey is generally dressed in roughly and
loosely fitting tweeds, suggestive of a country life and of sport,
the coat of his American cousin is of dark material and has not a
superfluous inch of cloth. From his collar to his neat little boot the
American is prim, spick-and-span, and looks as if he had come out of a
band-box and were ready to appear in the principal room of any office.
He is dressed in fact for business, and looks like business from
the crown of his head to the sole of his feet, while an Englishman's
appearance suggests that he is going to see a cricket match or that he
has retired to live upon a farm.
My countryman arrives at the station with two and a half minutes to
spare, and laden with small baggage. A porter carries his rug and an
ulster, very likely also a hat-box and a bag with books, papers, and
such like in it, to say nothing of an umbrella and a mackintosh, and he
secures his seat at the last moment. He fastens his hat above his head,
puts on a travelling cap, changes into an ulster, if it be winter time,
and throws a rug over his knee; he puts on travelling gloves, and gets
out the Times, and he will sit without budging and read his _Times_
without intermission for fifty minutes. Besides these trifles with him
in the carriage, he has a portmanteau in the van, which he hopes has
been addressed, and which the porter promised to see put in, and he will
scramble for it at his terminus along with a hundred other passengers,
who are all trying to identify and extricate their luggage from a huge
heap on the platform.
The American reaches the dépôt by a trolley car ten minutes at least
before the hour of departure, having sent his heavy luggage, if he
has any--which is not likely--by baggage express. His only personal
equipment is a slim and compact valise, which, in regard to opening and
shutting, is a marvel of convenience. This he carries in his hand, and
places beneath or beside the seat which he has secured two days before.
He does not carry a rug because the cars are heated, nor an umbrella
because it is not the rainy season. His top coat he hangs up beside his
seat, as if he were in his own house; and his hat if he so please. He
does not wear a travelling-cap any more than in his own drawing-room,
nor gloves in the train any more than in his own office. Should his
hands be soiled, he goes to the lavatory where there are large basins
and an ample supply of water, and if his coat be dusty, there is a
negro porter in every car to brush it. The immense repose of the English
traveller is quite impossible for this mercurial man, whose blood and
whose brain are ever on a stir. Very rarely will you see him reading a
book, because he is not accustomed to read, and the demands of a book
would lessen his time for business meditation. Boys with newspapers
circulate through the cars, and he buys each new paper as it appears
at the different towns. Whether it be Republican, or Democratic, or a
family paper or a yellow journal, does not matter to him; he glances at
the startling headings, takes an accident or a political scandal at
a mouthful, skims over the business news, sees whether anything has
happened at the Philippines, notes that the canard of the morning has
been contradicted in the afternoon, and flings paper after paper on
the floor. Three minutes or, in cases of extreme interest, five minutes
suffice for each paper, and by-and-by this omnivorous reader, who
consumes a paper even more quickly than his food, is knee deep in
printed information or sensation. For two minutes he is almost quiet,
and seems to be digesting some piece of commercial information. He then
rises hurriedly, as if he had been called on the telephone, and makes
for the smoking-car, where he will discuss “Expansion” with vivid,
picturesque speech, and get through a cigar with incredible celerity.
Within fifteen minutes he is in his place again; and, a little
afterwards, wearying of idleness, he is chewing the end of a cigar,
which is a substitute for smoking and saves him from being wearied with
his own company. Half an hour before the train is due at his station,
he is being brushed, and getting ready to alight. Before the train
has reached the outskirts of the town, he has secured his place in a
procession which stands in single file in the narrow exit passage from
the Pullman. Each man is ready dressed for business and has his valise
in his hand; he is counting the minutes before he can alight, and is
envying the man at the head of the procession, who will have a start of
about two seconds. This will give him a great advantage in business, and
he may never be overtaken by his competitors till evening.
Suppose he lands at 6 a.m., he will find breakfast ready in a hotel,
and half a dozen men eating as if their lives depended upon finishing
by 6.15 a.m. Before seven he will have disposed of a pile of letters,
dictating answers to a typist attached to the hotel, he will have
telegraphed in all directions, and made half a dozen appointments in the
town by telephone. Within the forenoon he will finish his business and
depart for some neighbouring town, lunching on the cars. The second town
he will dispose of in the afternoon, and that evening go on board
the sleeper to travel 400 miles to a third town, where he is going to
negotiate a contract at 8 o'clock next morning. If you sympathize with
him, and wonder how flesh and blood can stand the speed, he accepts your
sympathy as a compliment, and assures you that he never sleeps so well
as on the cars. He never seems to be out of sorts or out of temper: he
is always thoroughly alive and quite good-natured. Sometimes he may
seem for a moment annoyed, when he cannot telegraph as often as he wants
along the line, or when the train is not on time, that he may make a
connection. Nothing would wound him so deeply as to “get left,” and he
can only affect to be unconscious when some one declares that he is “no
slouch, and that there are no flies on him.” If he is obliged to spend
two hours doing nothing in a hotel, when business is over, then he rocks
himself and smokes, and it is a wonderful spectacle for an indolent
Englishman to look down from the gallery that commands the hall of the
hotel, and to see fifty able-bodied fellow-men who have worked already
twelve hours, at least, and put eighteen hours' work into the time,
all in motion. (One wonders why this motion is not utilized to drive
something.) He discovers how unlike cousins may be, for an Englishman
never moves unless he is obliged to or unless he wants to shoot
something, and these remarkable men never rest unless when they are
asleep. About that even, I am not sure, and I was often tempted to draw
aside the curtain from a berth in a sleeping-car, and, had I done so, I
should not have been at all surprised to find our friend wide awake
with a cold cigar in his cheek, and rocking his knees for want of more
extensive accommodation. He has always rebelled against the ancient
custom of sleep, which he regards as a loss of time and an anachronism.
All that he can do is to spend the night in a sleeping car, which, as he
will tell you, annihilates time and space.
Foreigners travelling in the States in their innocence are amazed that
a delicate-minded nation, like the Americans, should be willing to sleep
after the fashion of the Pullman cars, and should not insist upon the
Continental cabin-car. The reason for the Arcadian simplicity of the
sections is not really economy, for no American would ever think twice
of spending a dollar; it is simply their abounding and dominant energy.
If you sleep in cabins at night, you must sit in cabins by day; and
this would mean a seclusion and repose which are very distasteful to
the high-strung American temperament. It would be like bottling up a
volatile gas; and one imagines that it might lead to an explosion, which
some day would break down the partitions and break up the car from end
to end. The American must see everything in his car and hear everything,
for which he depends upon the peculiar quality of the local voice;
and he must be at liberty to prowl about his car, and to sit with his
friends here and there. The car is his little world for the time, and he
is not going to live in a backwater.
There seems no doubt that an American workman will do from twenty-five
to thirty-three per cent, more than an Englishman in the same time, and
that the higher wages of the American have their compensation for
the capitalist in a workman's quickness of mind and sleight of hand.
Everything goes at an accelerated speed, with wonderful inventions in
labour-saving machinery and devices to economize time. If the great end
of a nation be to do as much as possible in as short a time as possible,
then the American climate has been practically arranged for that end. An
Englishwoman living in the States becomes effervescent, and the native
American is the brightest woman on the face of the earth. While the
English atmosphere is heavy and soothing, and lends itself to thought
and quietness, the American climate is exciting and exhilarating, and
quickens both mind and body to the highest activity. It is an electric
climate, and the electricity has passed into the people, who are simply
vessels charged up to a certain number of volts. These vessels as
sources of motive power can then be attached to pulpits, or offices, or
workshops or politics. Of course, a day is apt to come when the vessels
will have been completely discharged, and it arrives very frequently
without warning. A little confusion in the head, and a slight numbness
in the limbs, and the man has to go away a year to Colorado Springs
or to Los Angeles. If he is fortunate, he can be recharged and run for
another five or ten years; then nature does not give any warning, but
simply stops the heart or darkens the brain, and you must get another
man.
No one, unless he leaves the country or becomes a crank, can escape from
this despotism of activity; he is part of the regiment and must march
with his fellows. The idea of making a competency and then retiring,
say, into the country, never crosses a man's mind. When you urge economy
upon a man for this end, you have injured your case, and are pleading
on the other side. With such a prospect before him, he is more than
ever resolved to be a spendthrift. To seclude an active American in an
old-fashioned country house, with ivy climbing round its Tudor windows,
even although there should be a library of black oak inside and a rose
garden outside, would be cruelty; it would be to imprison a squirrel in
a golden cage. What greatly impresses the traveller in the United States
is that the rich men work as hard and as long as the poor, and that
they cannot even give attention to the affairs of their country, but
are willing to leave them to the very doubtful management of the “Boss,”
because it would not pay them to leave their business and go into
politics. If the end of life be riches, then the clever American is a
successful man, for in no country does a respectable man become so very
rich, or rich so soon, and if not respectable he still may do fairly
well. You cannot have everything, however, and one notes that the
average rich man has paid a price for his dollars. He has read very
little--his wife reads for him; he has travelled very little--his
daughters travel for him. He has no voice in the State--professional
politicians speak for him; he has no amusements, unless you include
speculation; and he has no pleasant periods of rest, unless you accept
as an equivalent comparatively early and sudden death, which often
arises from acute indigestion. He has not time to stop and realize
himself, unless, but this is a large exception, when he has dyspepsia.
One reason, perhaps, why Americans do not rest is that given to me by a
bright woman: “We are all so tired,” and the American is the victim of
his own qualities.
One, of course, acknowledges the advantages of this amazing energy, and
there are times when a stolid Englishman grows envious. A university in
America is created in ten years and endowed to the extent of millions
sterling, and equipped with chairs of which a European never dreamt, and
laboratories which border upon palaces. Libraries and picture galleries
are rising in every city, for which the treasuries of Europe have been
ransacked; and, were it not for the restriction of governments, the Old
Masters would have to be sought, not in Italy and England, but in New
York and Chicago. New towns are designed upon a scale of magnificence,
as if each were to be the capital of an empire, and are at least
outlined in building within a few years. Should it be necessary, an army
can be created within a few months, and in a couple of years a new
trade can be established which will kill its European rivals. An English
farmer with fifteen hundred acres is a considerable man, but an American
can have fifteen thousand acres and his different farm buildings will be
connected by telephone. A self-made man in England marries his daughter
to a baronet and is much lifted; but the daughter of a self-made man
in America will marry an English duke, and consider she has conferred
a benefit. When you go to a Western town, you may be taken to see a
university; if not, you are taken to a dry-goods store; each, in its own
way, is the largest of its kind. Certainly, there are stores in America
which have no rival in the Old World, and which you are expected to
visit with the same appreciation as the Duomo of Florence.
There is almost nothing that the United States does not possess, except
political purity, and nothing which an American cannot do, except rest;
and in the conflict with foreign competition, he has almost discounted
victory. Whether he be able, that is, patient and thorough in the
discovery of principles, may be a question; that he is clever, by which
one means bright and ingenious in turning principles to account, is
beyond all question. If America has not yet had time to produce a
Lord Kelvin, it has given us telephones; and if Professor Dewar has
astonished the world with his liquid air, an American trust is, it
is said, being formed to handle it for commercial purposes. If we are
thought to be dull and slow, as we travel among the most stimulating and
hospitable people on the face of the earth, let some excuse be made for
us and let our hosts share the blame. An Englishman in the United States
is half dazed, like one moving amid the ceaseless din and whirling
wheels of a huge manufactory, where the voice has to be raised to a
shriek, and a sentence compressed into a single word. He goes home
greatly humbled in his estimation of himself, and in low spirits about
the commercial future of his country. He has no bitterness, however,
within his heart, for are not these people of his own blood, and are not
their triumphs his, even if they threaten to outrun his own nation in
the race of productive commerce? And when he comes back to England, has
he not his compensations, Stratford-on-Avon, and Westminster Abbey, and
the greenery of the Home Counties, and the lights and shadows of the
Scots Lochs, and the musical voices of the English women, and the quiet,
contented, cultured English homes?