Chapter 21

School Teaching from 1869 onwards.(p. 542)

Business would also be conducted on youthful principles, in consonance with the other rapid ways of the times; capital would be nimble and alert, creating profits so lively that they would leap back into the common and rapidly running current. Old legislative peculators, bank and trust defaulters, would soon, in the natural course of things, and without the shocks of legal trials,—which generally produce no results,—be displaced; while young iniquity would scarcely acquire the rime and rust which now incrust so many of the old instruments of corruption, making them almost respectable. Biographies, now often running tediously through so many chapters, would be brief; as an American life might be assumed to close up substantially at twenty-five at least, and we should get the rich morning cream, without wearying ourselves with collecting the thin globules that float on the pan of age.

In the better times to which of course everybody looks, we take it for granted, also, that the every-dayarts and the familiar sciences, now taught in schools and colleges, will be laid aside; and that Greek, Latin, French, German, Italian, Irish, and other tongues,—those sad reminders of Babels and other polyglot attempts and results,—will give place to more practical studies. How to cook, so as not to destroy the remnants of stomachs left by candy-eating, hot breads, and other delectable addictions of the old barbarous times which America has passed dyspeptically through; how to get a husband or wife, in every way suited to the expectations and ideas of different members of the family, and on a scale mathematically adjusted to the pecuniary latitude and longitude calculated from the paternal meridian; how to scale a tariff for conductors, which shall not raise the market price of gold rings, studs, and heavy watches, and yet leave something for the directors to operate the stock with; the best methods of acquiring a fortune without the stale process of failure and settling with creditors; the mode of conducting railway collisions and steamboat explosions, without ruining whole families and destroying rising communities at a blow, and without leaving so many facetious questions to funny coroners and irresistibly comic jurors; a method of advertising wares and leaving some praiseful adjectives not used up; a system which should graduate the decrease in weights and measures to the price; and how to make an hour’s work go as far as ten old-fashioned absurd hours,—these will help to furnish out a curriculum of study for institutions high and low.

The fashions will be regulated by the Secretary of the Treasury, who will issue a daily telegraphic bulletin,so that no one shall have any advantage over another.

The President of the United States, by way of keeping his hand in, may practise on a Sunday school every Sunday, addressing them in rotation, and going over those in New Jersey and Texas several times, if a safe pass can be secured. The antique modes of mining will be abolished altogether. A central bureau, located in Wall Street, will so work all kinds of veins and arteries, auriferous, argentiferous, and verdibackish, as to entice out all their values on call.

The traditions about gold are to be wrought up into poetry, and thus forever forgotten.

We have been put in possession of the advance sheets of several reports, to be made to the various State legislatures in 1969, on “The Absence of Legislative Corruption,” from which it is manifest, that nothing with money in it ever reaches the capitals of that day, and that the members are left to the tedious business of practical legislation, their spare time being amused with antiquarian researches into the capital chances for money-making between 1860 and 1870. It is also apparent from these coming reports that great amusement is to be afforded by a study of the severely virtuous styles of examinations, conducted by committees of our time, into alleged briberies of fellow-members; while the hotel bills of the cautious investigators are to be regarded as inimitable specimens of the gastronomic abundance of their predecessors in America.

We also take for granted, that the railway system of the United States will be wonderfully simplified.We now make it a matter of boasting that since the beginning of our railways, in 1829, we have extended them until, in forty years, they have reached a length of 38,500 miles, or a circuit around the earth one and a half times; costing in their construction and equipment $1,700,000,000, or a sum equal to two thirds of the debt of the United States; employing 8,000 engines and 135,000 cars, or enough, if placed side by side, to reach from New York to Chicago, and carrying annually 145,000,000 of passengers, or a number more than four times the whole population, men, women, children, and John Smiths put together. We are jubilant over the completion, in four years, of the Pacific Railroad, 1,900 miles in length, forming a line from New York to San Francisco of 3,353 miles, straining across prairies, chasing off herds of buffalo, spitting Utah with a skewer, climbing the Sierras 8,000 feet high, and levelling the Rocky Mountains with iron maces.

All these performances are, in the absence of anything better, and in our poor beginnings, not disdainful topics of conversation or newspaper comment. But in the near future we take it, that a single consolidation of all lines in the hands of one man,—whose name at present we mercifully withhold,—replacing our wooden depots with stone structures tastefully decorated with waving flags and live eagles, our tressel-work bridges with solid granite buttresses, spanned by iron girders,—the old ones being kept under glass cases for curious exhibition,—will so prolong, carry around, and multiply iron ways, that the entire population of the United States, excepting, perhaps, newspaperreporters and members of Congress, will be invited several times a year to take a pleasure trip, gratuituously, to every town having a thousand inhabitants, and be entertained six months on the suspended dividends, made palatable by watered stock.

The American Laocoön.(p. 547)

Grumbling will, also, in those gladsome days, be left to the unnaturalized Englishmen among us, and to those wry-faced observers of the weather and crops, who get up such very unlively stacks of figures, and elongate their rueful faces beneath their cold shadows.

Patriotism will, of course, be merged in a cosmopolitan feeling; for, as our boundaries will naturally take in nearly all the world, what is outside will be the subjects of our pity and commiseration, as those portions of the globe unfortunately left outside of England were, a few years ago, to Englishmen.

Chicago will then have so many elevators, that she will raise not only her surface above Lake Michigan, but her manners to a point where mending can begin. New York will doubtless be ruled by a descendant of the Fisk-al family, who will utilize New Jersey as a railroad depot or a coal-yard. Philadelphia, letting go of New York as a bad job, beneath her satire, will have such a Rush-ing library as to be the book lender of the Union. Boston will be, to her delight, roofed in, and become the Publication Office of Fields, Osgood, & Co., with Faneuil Hall and the Athenæum for press-work and lithographing; while the Southern cities along the coast will serve as light-houses for the dark landscapes which have hitherto glowered behind them.

Cotton will be more than king,—will be a goodthrifty farmer, replacing broom-sedgy fields with smiling furrows, razor-backed hogs with blooded stock, and will stand out in round completeness, not isolated by a heritage which kept it aloof from the world, but linked in a rosy chain of productive good with the happy brotherhood of work, prosperity, and well-doing.

We need hardly add, that we shall leave off praising ourselves when we shall most deserve praise, and cease to be sensitive to foreign censure when we shall be hardy enough to laugh at it.

As everybody is naturally expecting to be happy, so we expect that everybody will be, without being seriously hurt or stunted by any of the little taps of this history.Pax vobiscum.

Meanwhile, and until all these blessed times and expectations shall converge into the focalizing future, we trust that our readers, jolly, good, and happy, will get over, as best they can, the intermediate spaces, keeping their eye and faith steadily upon

THE END.

Transcriber’s NoteGiven the humorous intent of the author, and the age of this edition, one must circumspect regarding oddities of spelling and hyphenation. Hyphenation at line breaks is retained only when a word is very clearly unhyphenated everywhere else. Otherwise, hyphens appear as printed.Errors deemed most likely to be the printer’s have been corrected, and are noted here. The references are to the page and line in the original.22.27What England lost and America gained[.]Restored.57.8and commis[s]erate the otherRemoved.126.12W[o/u]ter Van TwillerInverted.149.16found its supply of [anthracile] coalsic: anthracite?196.18is[s]ued once a weekAdded.269.28the king of Great Brit[ia/ai]nTransposed.339.24for the four follow[i]ng yearsInserted.355.21when the speaker’s gav[i/e]l fellReplaced.367.4and the ac[c]umulated taxes uponInserted.392.12and first smell of villa[i]nous saltpetreInserted.418.22rose simultaneously[,/.]Replaced.498.3and with Fort Henry, Feb[ur/ru]ary 6thTransposed.498.8Feb[ur/ru]ary 16thTransposed.537.8we take for [grant-ed] nowsic505.12and beleagu[e]red from May 4, 1863Inserted.531.23The restless, [lever] pen of Mr. Sewardsic: clever?

Transcriber’s Note

Given the humorous intent of the author, and the age of this edition, one must circumspect regarding oddities of spelling and hyphenation. Hyphenation at line breaks is retained only when a word is very clearly unhyphenated everywhere else. Otherwise, hyphens appear as printed.

Errors deemed most likely to be the printer’s have been corrected, and are noted here. The references are to the page and line in the original.

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