CHAPTER XXII.
AMERICAN HOTELS—WHY SOME PEOPLE IN AMERICA TRAVEL WITHOUT ANY LUGGAGE—CONVERSATION AT TABLES-D’HÔTE SHOULD BE ENCOURAGED—THE IRISH, THE AFRICAN, AND THE CHINESE—CAN A REPUBLIC DO WITHOUT A SERVILE CLASS?—WHAT WILL BE THE ULTIMATE FATE OF THESE THREE RACES IN AMERICA—NO CHILDREN—MOTIVES—MEANS—CONSEQUENCES—WHY MANY YOUNG MEN AND YOUNG WOMEN MAKE SHIPWRECK OF HAPPINESS IN AMERICA—THE COURSE MANY FAMILIES RUN—AMERICA THE HUB OF THE WORLD.
AMERICAN HOTELS—WHY SOME PEOPLE IN AMERICA TRAVEL WITHOUT ANY LUGGAGE—CONVERSATION AT TABLES-D’HÔTE SHOULD BE ENCOURAGED—THE IRISH, THE AFRICAN, AND THE CHINESE—CAN A REPUBLIC DO WITHOUT A SERVILE CLASS?—WHAT WILL BE THE ULTIMATE FATE OF THESE THREE RACES IN AMERICA—NO CHILDREN—MOTIVES—MEANS—CONSEQUENCES—WHY MANY YOUNG MEN AND YOUNG WOMEN MAKE SHIPWRECK OF HAPPINESS IN AMERICA—THE COURSE MANY FAMILIES RUN—AMERICA THE HUB OF THE WORLD.
During the week I was at Boston, I dined for the last time in an American hotel; for the fortnight I afterwards spent in my second visit to New York, I passed in the hospitable house of Mr. Henry Eyre, a brother of the Rector of Marylebone, and a worthy representative of Englishmen in the commercial capital of America. With this exception, at the close of my tour, I made it a rule, from which I never departed, to decline all invitations to stay in private houses. My reason for doing this was, that I might come and go as I pleased, and have my time always at my own disposal. This gave me abundant opportunities, as my travels extended over 8,000 miles of American ground, for forming an estimate of their hotels and hotel life. With a few exceptions here and there, in some of the large eastern cities, the hotels are on the monster scale, and managed on the American system. The exceptionsare called English, or European hotels, and their speciality is that you only pay in them for what you have. On the American system you pay so much a day for board and lodging; liquors and washing being extras. That the American system is the cheapest and most convenient, is demonstrated by its universality. The few exceptions that exist have to be inquired after and sought out. A traveller will also avoid them, because he is desirous of seeing the manners and customs of the people; and these can nowhere be seen so readily, and to such an extent, as in the monster hotels. They are a genuine production of the soil, are in perfect harmony with American wants and ideas, and are all alike.
American Hotels.
Their distinguishing features are that the greater part of their guests are not travellers, but lodgers and boarders; and that they have one fixed charge for all, of so many dollars a day. The dearest I entered was the Fifth Avenue Hotel at New York, which charged five dollars a day; the board consisting of five such meals as no hotel in England or Europe could supply without bankruptcy. They are enabled to do this, because they have to supply these meals for several hundred persons. And they have this large number of guests, because multitudes of families, that they may escape the expense and annoyances of house-keeping, live in the hotels, and multitudes of men in business, keeping only a counting-house or a store in the city, do the same. The cheapest I was ever in charged three dollars and a half a-day. The service is so well organised in these hotels, that you may come or go at any hour of the night; and you can get your linen washed and returned to your roomin a few hours. While dressing one morning at the Sherman House at Chicago, I sent out my linen to the laundry; on going back to my room at half-past eleven, I found that it had been washed and returned. This rapidity with which the washing of linen is performed in America enables one to travel with much less than would be requisite in Europe; and it explains why one often sees people travelling in America with no more than they can carry in a little hand-bag, called, in the language of the country, a satchel.
It does not, however, explain why some people in America travel with no luggage at all. Some of those whom I observed entering and leaving the cars in this light and unimpeded fashion, told me they had adopted the system because the work of the washerwoman had been advancing among them, not more in rapidity than it had done in costliness, so that it was now cheaper to get a new article, something at the same time being allowed for the old soiled one, than to send one of the same species to the laundry of the hotel. By acting on this idea they had escaped the necessity of taking with them relays of linen. I suppose this system must be an encouragement to the trade in paper shirt-collars. The difficulty as to razors, brushes, and combs, is easily met by the provision made in the barber’s shop of every hotel. The Americans are full of original ideas, and they are very great travellers; it was therefore to be expected that they would be the first people to organise and perfect a system of travelling like the birds of the air.
Conversation at Meals.
The Americans having now revolutionised throughout the whole country the method of serving hotel dinners, passing at one step from what was the worstmethod of all to what is greatly in advance of the practice in this matter of all other nations, I would venture to suggest another change in a matter of still greater importance. It is evident that civilisation would have been quite an impossibility, if people had not met together at meals for the purpose of conversation. This alone rescues the act of taking one’s food from its animal character, and associates it with the exercise of our moral and intellectual qualities. If we do not meet together, and converse, and exchange thought, and cultivate courtesies, our meals differ in no respects from the act of a horse or of a pig taking a feed. It is a strange mistake to suppose that there is anything intellectual orspirituelin hurrying through one’s meals. The truth of the matter is exactly the reverse. To tarry at the table for the purpose of conversation makes every meal a school for the intellect, and for the promotion of the domestic and social graces. The savage hurries over his meals because he is a savage, morally and intellectually near of kin to the brute. If he could tarry over his meals he would have ceased to be a savage. All ancient and modern nations that have been highly civilised have acted instinctively on this idea. The Atticsymposia, as well as the Frenchpetits soupers, rested upon it. Suppose meals are to be silently hurried through, they become mere brutish acts of eating and drinking, which any animal can perform as well as ourselves, and in much less time too. It is here that the Americans have a grand opportunity, in their widely diffused and generally practised hotel life, of which, it seemed to me, they were not availing themselves. You will see people day after day sit down to the same table,take their food in silence, and leave the table without a word having been spoken. You may observe several tables occupied at the same time in your neighbourhood, and there shall be no conversation going on at any one of them. Those who sit at them appear to be entirely occupied either with their own thoughts or with attention to what they are eating. But it would make hotel life far more agreeable, and impart to it a far greater amount of civilising power, if it were the rule that people who meet at the same table might converse with one another, without any previous acquaintance, and without any necessity for subsequent acquaintance. Let it be understood that on such occasions conversation is the correct and the civilised thing.
No American will ever undertake any of the lower forms of labour—very few of the men before the mast in American ships are native-born. The class of agricultural labourers is unknown among them. What labour they have of this kind is supplied by immigration. No American would become a footman or hotel waiter. Their railways were not made by American navvies. In the North all the lower kinds of labour—but which, though they rank low as employments, are still necessary to the well-being, even to the existence of society—have hitherto fallen to the lot of the Irish, English, and German immigrants. Their place has been taken in the South by the blacks, and in the Pacific States by the Chinese.
The Future of the Servile Classes.
This suggests two very interesting questions. The first is, Can a republic be carried on without a servile class? What would be the state of things in the American Union if it were deprived of the services of the Irish, the blacks, and the Chinese? Of coursethe loss would be much felt, and would very much retard the progress of the country; but I do not think that it would be a loss that would be irremediable and ruinous. As soon as the country begins to fill up, there will begin to appear in America the class that has existed in every country in the world, composed of those who have neither property nor a knowledge of any trade (which can seldom be obtained by those who have no property), and who therefore have nothing to live upon except their power of doing rude and unskilled work.
The other question is, What will be the future in the American Republic of these three races? The African, we may be sure, will either die out, which is most probable, or become a low caste, the pariahs of the New World: retail trade and a few of the lower kinds of labour and employment will be open to them. They will possess civil but not political rights. The Irish will be absorbed into the general population; and so one may speculate to what extent this will affect the American character. The Chinese can never be absorbed. What therefore will be the position that they will occupy in the Union fifty or a hundred years hence? Hitherto only one State has been open to them, that of California. Can anything be inferred from the position they have created for themselves in that State? I think we may be safe in supposing that, as they have already crossed the Pacific to the number of sixty thousand, when by the completion of the Pacific Railway the whole of the Union is thrown open to them, they will not remain cooped up in California. In a few years I believe they will be found in New York, and in all the largecities of the west and east. Voltaire said that the true wall of China was the American continent, the interposition of which saved it from European invasion; but it appears now that the American continent is the very point at which the European races will be invaded by the long pent up population of China. To what extent will this invasion be carried? and what consequences will result from it? One thing, I think, may be foreseen—the Americans will not admit these Asiatics, aliens in religion as well as in race, to political equality with themselves.
A recent writer on America has informed us that there is a disinclination among the wives of the luxurious cities of the Atlantic seaboard to become mothers. I found, after enquiry made everywhere on the spot, that this indisposition to bring up children is not confined to the wives or to the cities this writer’s words indicate, but is participated in, to a large extent, by the husbands, and is coextensive with the American Union. It is just as strongly felt at Denver, two thousand miles away, as at New York, and results in almost as much evil at New Orleans as at Chicago.
Limitation of Offspring.
The feeling—or, it might be said, this absence of natural feeling—may easily be explained. The expenses and annoyances of house-keeping are in America very great; and young couples, except when they are rich—and such cases must always form a small minority—generally escape them by living in hotels. Hotel living is always according to tariff, so much a week for each person. To a couple living in this way, and barely able to find the means for it, the cost of every additional child can be calculated toa dollar, and is seriously felt. As long as they are without children they may get on comfortably enough, and go into society, and frequent places of amusement. But if encumbered with the expense of a family, they will have to live a far quieter and less gay life. They cannot give up their autumn excursion, they cannot give up balls, and dresses, and concerts, and carriages. Therefore the husband and wife come to an understanding that they will have but one child, or that they will have no children at all.
Another reason for the practice, which would appear to affect the wife only, but which has frequently much weight with the husband also, is that the American lady’s reign is not, under any circumstances, a long one. She has generally considerable personal attractions, but the climate and the habits, of living are so trying that beauty is very short-lived. The young wife therefore argues, ‘My good time will under any circumstances be short; why, therefore, should I prematurely dilapidate myself by having half-a-dozen children? And indeed what would that come to, but that I should have no good time at all, for the whole of it would be given up to the nursery? And by the time this would be over, I should be nothing but a wreck; my good looks will have disappeared, and I shall have fallen into premature old age.’
I met with husbands who themselves justified the practice on these grounds. They did not wish to have their wives, during the whole period of their good looks, in the nursery.
There is no secret as to the various means resorted to for carrying out these unnatural resolutions.They are advertised in every newspaper, and there are professors of the art in abundance, judging from the advertisements, in every city. There is one large establishment in the most fashionable street in the city of New York, from whence the great high priestess of this evil system dispenses her drugs and advice, and where also she receives those who need her direct assistance. These things are so notorious and are so much talked of, that one is absolved from the necessity of being at all reticent about them.
No one, of course, would suppose that any practice of this kind, so abhorrent to our best natural instincts, could become universal: nor is it so in America: many denounce it. But still it spreads; and we cannot expect that it will die away, as long as the motives which prompt it continue to be felt as strongly as they are at present.
I will note one of the evil consequences of the practice. When those who have acted in this unnatural way are no longer young, and the motives which prompted their conduct have ceased to have any weight, the husband and wife find that there is no tie between them. They have no reason to respect each other. Each condemns the other, and is in the other’s presence self-condemned. And this is one of the causes of the numerous divorces which so much astonish those who look into the social conditions of American life. Nature and our common moral sense will avenge themselves for such outrages.
Life-wrecks in America.
A stranger travelling in America is not likely to receive letters to any except prosperous persons, and so, unless he is on his guard against it, his personal experience is likely to be confined to the bright andsplendid side of society. But from the observations and enquiries I made, I came to the conclusion that there is no country in which the proportion of those whose destiny it is to suffer complete eclipse of happiness is so great as in the United States. Among men one chief cause of this appeared to me to be the irresistible attraction a life of heartless dissipation has for multitudes of young Americans. Why is this so? I believe their theory of social equality is responsible for some of it. They have a fatal craving to appear as fashionable, and to enjoy life as much as their wealthy neighbours. But I do not suppose that this will account for everything. After all, the careers that are open to city-bred young men are very limited. Practically for them there is not much beyond the counting-house and the store. Farming, the great employment of the country, is repulsive to them; and the ranks of the law are generally recruited from the hard-headed and enterprising sons of farmers. But be the cause what it may, there stands the fact that in the large American cities, and of course nowhere to such an extent as in New York, there is to be found a large class of young men of very limited means, who are living dissipated lives, and whose great aim is to appear fashionable—a detestable word, and a vulgar and unmanly idea, of which we in the old country have not heard much since the times of the Regency.
The case of the women who fail in life is more sad than that of the men, because, while they have less control over their own destinies, the failure in establishing a happy home is to them the failure of everything. The impracticable theory of social equality, Iwas again led to believe, was frequently the cause of such failures. These young women have been brought up in precisely the same way as their more fortunate sisters, at the same or at similar schools. This makes, in after life, the distinctions that meet the eye—of dress, equipage, and position—enter like iron into the soul; and so the determination to appear as others do becomes the rock upon which the happiness of many is wrecked.
These, however, are matters upon which a stranger will be very distrustful of his own observation, and will always hold himself open to correction from those upon the phenomena of whose social life he is commenting.
The Hub of the World.
I will append to the foregoing remarks on the way in which many young persons in American cities make a wreck of their life’s chances, an outline of the course I observed many families ran in America. The son of a farmer, we will say in Massachusetts, has some ambition. There is no field for ambition in New England farming. He therefore goes to Boston, or some commercial town, and becomes a lawyer, or a merchant, or a professional man of some kind or other. He rises to wealth and distinction, which are not so often secured by the city-born as by those who have the energy and vigour of new blood fresh from the country. He leaves his family well off. They never go back to the country. If any of the children have the energy and vigour of the father, they do not enter into business in Boston, but go out to the west, and help to build up such places as Chicago and Omaha. But if, as is generally the case, they have not energy and vigour enough for this, they go to New York, orsome large city, where refined society and amusements are to be had. Some travel much, and take life easily. Some occasionally enter into political life. They marry city ladies, who are possessed of great refinement, but have very bad constitutions. They have two or three children with long thin fingers and weak spines. There is no fourth generation.
An Englishman cannot feel towards Americans as he does towards Italians or Frenchmen. Wherever in America he sees a piece of land being cleared and settled, or a church or a school being built, he looks on as if something were being done by and for his own countrymen. There is, however, one thing the evil effects of which he regrets to see everywhere, and that is the restrictions by which his American brethren are everywhere limiting trade and production. As he goes through their vast continent, and visits region after region, each capable of producing some different commodity the world needs, in sufficient quantities for the wants of all civilised nations, he rejoices at the greatness of their prospects, at the contemplation of all the wealth that God has given them. And he feels certain that the day cannot be very distant when they themselves will make the discovery that a dollar’s worth of wheat, or maize, or cotton, or tobacco, or pork—and, when the plains shall be turned to account, of beef, or mutton, or wool—is exactly equal in value to a dollar’s worth of manufactured goods, and two dollars’ worth is exactly twice the value, and a hundred dollars’ worth is of exactly a hundred times the value. And that when they shall have made this discovery they will strike off the fetters from trade and production, and by a single vote oftheir legislature increase the national wealth no one can foresee how many fold; and thus make themselves, what their vast and all-producing country, commanding both oceans and placed midway between Europe and Asia, is only waiting to become—the hub of the world.