The Land We Live In Part 17

CHAPTER x.x.xVIII.

The American Republic the Most Powerful of Nations--Military and Naval Strength--Railways and Waterways--Industry and Art--Manufactures--The New South--Foreign and Domestic Commerce--An Age of Invention--Americans a Nation of Readers--The Clergy--Pulpit and Press--Religion and Higher Education--The Currency Question--Leading Candidates for the Presidency --A Sectional Contest Deplorable--What Shall the Harvest Be?

Thirty-two years ago the very existence of the American Republic was in the balance. Today it is the most powerful of nations, with forty-five stars, representing that number of States, on its flag, and unequalled in population, wealth or resources by any other civilized land. The men of America are not herded away from industry to drill in camps and garrison, and wait for a war that may never come. They continue to be producers, but should the need arise they would be found as good soldiers as any in the world, and for fighting on American soil better than the best of Europe. The American navy is already formidable, and becoming more formidable every year, and the spirit of the men who fought under Bainbridge, Decatur, Hull and Perry survives in their descendants.

However great the improvements in naval machines the men on the s.h.i.+p will always be of more importance than the armament. The American Republic has the men, and is fast acquiring the armament.

The people were never so closely united as now. Every new railway is a muscle of iron knitting together the joints of the Union, and no other nation has a railway service equal to that of America. Railways span the continent from New York to the Golden Gate. The traveler retires to rest in the North and wakes up in the sunny South. And still he can journey on in his own country, under the American flag, day after day, if he wishes, toward the setting sun, unvexed by custom house, and free from the inquisition which attends the stranger in Europe, as he flits from one petty State to another. The great national policy of encouraging the extension of railway and water communication is grandly vindicated in the America of to-day. When the Nicaragua Ca.n.a.l shall have been completed the American people will have a new waterway joining the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of the Republic, as important to the commerce of the Union as the Erie Ca.n.a.l was fifty years ago.

To describe the progress of the United States in the industries and arts would be a work requiring many volumes, including the census reports of 1890, and catalogues of the Centennial and Chicago Fairs. The Republic is not only the greatest of agricultural nations, but also leads Great Britain in manufactures. In the quality of our textile fabrics we are outstripping Europe, and the statement that cloth is imported is a temptation now only to ignorant purchasers. In the more refined arts America is also gaining upon the older world, and it is absurd to see Americans purchasing silverware, for instance, abroad when they can get a much finer article at home. The low wages and keen compet.i.tion of Europe have a degrading effect not only upon the workingman, but also in some degree upon his product, whereas here the artist and the artisan are encouraged by fair compensation and comfortable surroundings to do their best. The principle upon which American employers act--to give good pay for good work--is the secret of American success; it is the reason why even the semi-barbarians are learning that American goods are made to wear, while those of Europe are often made only to sell.

Manufactures are flouris.h.i.+ng in the South as well as the North, and it is wonderful to relate that, while the hum of busy factories can be heard in nearly every city, town and village of the former Confederacy, the cotton crop--which the Southern people in 1860 believed it impossible to produce without slave labor--has already reached with free labor about double the figures of 1860.

It is true that we do not have a large share of the foreign carrying trade, but it is also true that our merchant marine, including the vessels engaged in foreign and domestic trade and river and lake navigation, is second only to that of Great Britain. The domestic commerce of the United States, a free trade extending from Florida to Sitka, from Eastport to San Diego, is vastly greater than the foreign commerce of Great Britain.

The age has been one of marvelous inventions in steam, in electricity, in the machinery which has made nearly every mechanic and operative an engineer, which is driving the horse from the streets and the farms, and which enables one factory hand to produce as much as three produced a generation ago.

Submarine cables keep America in close touch with Europe, and even the gossip of Paris and London is known the same day in our cities. Everybody reads, and whereas the American of a generation ago took one newspaper, his son to-day probably takes two or three, besides weekly and monthly publications. Notwithstanding all that is said about ignorant foreign immigration it is certain that the growth of newspaper circulation in the past two decades has exceeded the growth of population. Americans are a reading people, and it is for every head of a family to see that his children have the right kind of reading.

The clergy are not now the political monitors of the community, as when, at the time of the Revolution, the election sermon preached in Boston, and printed in pamphlet form, was spelled by the light of the pine-knot in the cabin on the Berks.h.i.+re plantation, inspiring the rustic breast with holy zeal to deliver the Israel of the New World from the yoke of the English Sennacherib. The newspaper has taken the place of the pulpit as a political beacon and guide, and, as every denomination and congregation includes members of both the prominent national parties, it would be impossible for a clergyman to indulge in even a distant partisan allusion without offending some one of his hearers. The clergyman is free, like any other citizen, to indicate his preferences and express his opinions in regard to public affairs, but the judicious pastor is not p.r.o.ne to use that freedom indiscreetly.

Although the preachers are no longer political leaders, there is, in the opinion of the writer, based upon what he has heard and read of the past, and observed of the present, a larger proportion of learned, talented, and eloquent men among the pastors who minister in the churches to-day, than in any generation gone by. The clergy are still pre-eminently the molders of education. The presidents and professors of leading universities are usually prominent in some evangelical sect, and this is probably owing to the fact that every seminary of higher knowledge is under the control of a branch of the Christian Church, whose influence is predominant in the faculty, and which regards the college as a filial inst.i.tution, with traditions intertwined with its own. However skeptical or indifferent students may be to religion, they cannot fail to imbibe at least an esteem for the doctrines of the Saviour from the teachers who impart to them secular lessons. The impressions thus received by the plastic mind of youth are not likely to be ever wholly effaced. The man or the divinity we venerate at nineteen we instinctively bow to at forty.

The progress of the past thirty years has no doubt been due in an eminent degree to a sound and uniform currency. In the coming national election it will be decided whether that currency is to remain as it is--at the world's highest standard--or whether the mints of the United States are to be opened freely to the coinage of silver. Major William McKinley, one of the bravest soldiers of the Union army, and a statesman of recognized integrity and ability, is the candidate of the existing standard; the Hon. William J. Bryan, a brilliant young orator, is the candidate of free silver. The contest now opening is likely to be one of the most exciting the country has ever witnessed. Nothing could be more deplorable than for that contest to a.s.sume a sectional aspect, with West arrayed against East and East against West.

Come weal, come woe, this should and will remain a united country. The American nation is one people, and will remain one people. The destiny of one section is the destiny of all. North, East, West and South are traveling along a common highway toward a common future. Be that future one of prosperity or of calamity, all will share in it. Whatever the seed sown, whether of good or evil, all will reap the harvest, and it remains for all, therefore, to consider, as citizens of a common country, what shall the harvest be?

The American People.

CHAPTER x.x.xIX.

No Cla.s.ses Here--All Are Workers--Enormous Growth of Cities--Immigration --Civic Misgovernment--The Farming Population--Individuality and Self-reliance--Isolation Even in the Grave--The West--The South--The Negro--Little Reason to Fear for Our Country--American Reverence for Established Inst.i.tutions.

In the Old World meaning of the term there are no cla.s.ses of society here. There is no condition of life, however low, from which a man may not aspire and rise to the highest honors and the most enviable distinction, provided that he has the requisite natural endowments, favorable opportunities, and the ability and foresight to grasp them. The materials of which our American population is composed are various in origin and diverse in their ideas, their creeds, and their aims, but nevertheless full of vital force and energy, and with a less percentage of human weeds and refuse than any other nation on the globe. Nearly everybody is at work, from the manufacturer worth millions, to the tramp who earns his breakfast in the charity wood-yard. It is disreputable for any one in vigorous health and years, and even when of ample fortune, to be without employment, and for this reason rich young men frequently go through the form of admission to the bar, or of medical graduation, in order that it may not be said that they are unoccupied. The sons of wealth who ignore the industrious example of their sires are still too few in proportion to the mult.i.tude, and held in too general contempt, to more than irritate the social surface. The aristocracy of America is an aristocracy of workingmen--workingmen whose possessions are valued by the hundreds of thousands and millions of dollars, but still men who work.

Great cities exert an influence on public affairs unknown half a century ago. The enormous growth of munic.i.p.alities may be judged from the fact that the net munic.i.p.al expenses of New York City, exclusive of the city's share of the State debt, interest on the city's bonds, and money acquired for the payment of some of the bonds at maturity, amount to $33,000,000 annually. On schools alone New York spends this year $5,900,000; Chicago, $5,500,000, and Brooklyn, $2,500,000. This is the most hope-inspiring item in munic.i.p.al budgets. It may mean the salvation of the country.

The urban population is largely composed of the element known as "foreign." The sixteen millions of immigrants who have come to the United States since 1820, have made a deep impress on the Republic. Immigrants and the descendants of immigrants have been of the greatest value in developing American resources and building up American States, and the large majority of citizens of recent alien origin are sincerely attached to American inst.i.tutions. In the cities, however, and especially in New York and Chicago, may be found a cla.s.s of foreigners who unfortunately herd together in certain districts, and remain almost as alien to the American language and to American inst.i.tutions as when they first landed on our sh.o.r.es. Even these, however, are not irredeemable, and in the course of a generation or two their more obnoxious traits will probably disappear. Freedom of wors.h.i.+p and the public school have a curative and humanizing influence which not even the leprosy bred of centuries of European despotism and oppression can resist. I am not of those who view with apprehension or aversion the race of Christ, of David and of the Maccabees, of Disraeli and of Gambetta. There is no better cla.s.s of citizens than the better cla.s.s of Jews, and it would be a dishonorable day for our Republic should its gates ever be closed to the victims of religious intolerance, whatsoever their race or belief.

The great cities witness almost unceasing strife between what may be called the political-criminal element on the one side, and patriotism and intelligence on the other side. Knaves, using bigotry, ignorance and intimidation as their weapons, manage to control munic.i.p.al affairs, except when expelled from office for periods more or less brief by some sudden spasm of public virtue and indignation, like the revolt in the city of New York against the Tweed Ring a quarter of a century ago, and the reform victory in that city two years ago.

The overthrow of Tweed, and the great uprising of 1894 in New York, and of more recent date in Chicago, prove that the American people, once fully aroused, can crush, as with the hammer of Thor, any combination of public plunderers, however powerful. But why should these tremendous efforts be necessary? Why should not the latent energy which makes them possible be exerted in steady and uniform resistance to the restless enemies of pure and popular government?

The farming population, although largely overshadowed by manufacturing and commercial interests, is still the anchor of the Republic. In many of the States the rural vote is predominant, although in the nation as a whole it is gradually losing ground, owing to the growth of the cities, the removal of restrictions on the suffrage, and the partial adjustment of representation to numbers. The most striking features in the character of the native farmer are individuality and self-reliance. These qualities have been inherited from ancestors who were compelled _by_ circ.u.mstances to depend upon their own industry for a living, and their own vigilance and courage for defence, when the treacherous Indian lurked in swamps and woods, and the father attended Sunday wors.h.i.+p with a weapon by his side.

The founders of these States were men who thought for themselves, or they would not have been exiles for the sake of conscience. Their situation made them still more indifferent to the opinions and concerns of the world from which they were divided, while they stood aloof even from each other, except when common danger drove them to unite for mutual protection. Their offspring grew up amid stern and secluded surroundings, and the thoughts and habits of the parent became the second nature of the child. I have often imagined that in the firm, wary, and reserved expression on the Yankee farmer's face was photographed the struggle of his progenitors two centuries ago. This wariness and reserve does not, as a rule, amount to churlishness. The American, like the English cultivator, has felt the ameliorating influences of modern civilization, and while he retains his strong individuality, his intelligence prompts him to benefit by the opportunities denied to his forefathers.

The dwelling of the American farmer is usually lacking in those tasteful accessories which add such a charm to the cottage homes of England and France. Beyond the belt of suburban villas one seldom sees a carefully tended flower-garden, or an attractive vine. The yard, like the field, is open to the cattle, and, if there is a plot fenced in, it is devoted, not to roses and violets, but to onions or peas. The effect is dreary and uninviting, even though the enclosure may be clean, and the milk-cans scoured to brilliancy. Again we see in this disregard for the beautiful the effect of isolation upon the native character, the result of hard grubbing for the bare needs of existence. The primitive settlers needed every foot of the land which they laboriously subdued, for some productive use; they had neither time nor soil to spare for the culture of the beautiful; and their descendants have inherited the ancestral disposition to utilize everything, and the ancestral want of taste for the merely charming in nature. Yet there are gratifying exceptions to the general rule, and sometimes a housewife may be met who takes pride and pleasure in her flower-beds. No doubt it was such a wife that the lonesome old farmer was speaking of one evening, in a group by a roadside tavern, as the writer pa.s.sed along. "My wife loved flowers," he mournfully said, as his weary eyes seemed to look back into the past, "and I must go and plant some upon her grave."

The spirit of independence and isolation extends in many of the old American families even to the tomb. An interesting monograph might be written on the private graveyards in some parts of the East. Among the shade-trees surrounding a house on the busy street, in the orchard behind the farmer's barn, and again in the depth of the wood, a few rude, unchiseled headstones, perhaps nearly hidden by tangled brush, reveal the spot where sleep the forefathers of the plantation. I came across such a burying-ground not long ago. It was far from the traveled highway, far from the haunts of living men, among trees and grapevines, and blueberry bushes. The depression in the soil indicated that the perishable remains had long ago crumbled to dust, while a large hole burrowed in the earth showed where a woodchuck made its home among the bones of the forgotten dead. With reverent hand I cleared the leaves from about the primitive monuments, and sought for some word or letter that might tell who they were that lay beneath the silver birches, in the silent New England forest. But the stones, erect as when set by sorrowing friends perhaps two hundred years ago, bore neither trace nor mark. There were graves enough for a household, and likely a household was there. It maybe a father who had fled from Old England to seek in the wilderness a place where he might wors.h.i.+p G.o.d according to the dictates of his heart; a Pilgrim wife and mother, whose gentle love mellowed and softened the harshness of frontier life, and sons and daughters, cut off before the growth of commerce tempted the survivors to the town, or the reports of new and fertile territories induced them to abandon the rugged but not ungrateful paternal fields. With gentle step, so not to disturb the sacred stillness of the scene, I turned from the lonely graves, and I thought as I walked, that these simple tombs in the bosom of nature well befitted those who had dared the dangers of wild New England for freedom from the empty forms of a mitred religion.

History can be read in secluded resting-places of the departed. With the accretion of wealth to the living more care was expended upon the dead, and enduring slabs of slate, with appropriate engravings, took the place of the uncouth fragments of rock. With added riches the taste for display in headstones, as well as in social life, increased, and imported marble was occasionally used to designate the tombs of prosperous descendants of the early and impoverished settlers. Not infrequently all three--the unlettered stone of the first hundred years, the slate of the latter half of the last century, and the polished and costly marble now so common in the great public cemeteries--may be seen in one small burying-ground, bearing mute testimony to the struggles and progress of the occupants.

It is a fact which bears striking testimony to the masterful qualities of the native American character that in the Western States, notwithstanding a vast foreign immigration, the dominant element is of the old colonial stock. The fortunes of the West are guided by emigrants and the descendants of emigrants from New England, the Middle and the border States, and while adopted citizens, nearly all of a desirable cla.s.s, are in a majority in many parts of the West, most of the western men and women also, of national fame, can trace an American pedigree for several generations. There are notable exceptions to this rule, but they only ill.u.s.trate the rule. This condition is due not to any inferiority on the part of the immigrant population to the average of European nationalities--for, barring Russia and some southern countries we receive the cream of European manhood--but to American heredity, to the inheritance of those endowments which qualify for leaders.h.i.+p in a nation of freemen. The western American is more aggressive and progressive than his eastern cousin. Just as the New Englander retains many of the expressions and some of the ways which have become obsolete in Old England, so the native settler of Kansas, of Iowa, of Nebraska, and even of the nearer States of Ohio and Illinois, is more like the New Englander of half a century ago than those who have remained on the ancestral soil.

He has the old Puritan love of learning, and from the humble colleges in which his more ambitious children are educated go forth the Joshuas and the Davids of our American Israel. The total yearly expenses of one of those western colleges would hardly equal the salary of the chief of a great university, but presidents of the United States are graduated there.

The western farmer reads and thinks, and perhaps in that clear western air, as he ploughs the sod of the prairie, and reaps the harvest on his rude domain, he sees farther into the future than his brother of the East. Right or wrong in his political views, he is at any rate honest in them, and if his convictions seem to partake sometimes of the fervor of the crusader, it should not be forgotten that the spirit of Ossawattomie Brown yet lives in the land which he saved for freedom; it should not be forgotten that nearly every western homestead has its grave in the battlefields of the war which made us one people forever. Making due allowance for that good-natured raillery which is one of the spices of existence, it may be truthfully said that anyone who laughs in earnest at the West calls attention merely to his own shallow conceit. Intelligent people in the East are studying, not ridiculing the West.

The recuperative energy displayed by the Southern people has been even more wonderful and admirable than that exhibited by France after the German conquest. France was not denuded, as the South was denuded of all that represents wealth save a fertile soil and the resolution to rise from the ashes of the past. And the South has risen. I pa.s.sed through North Carolina and Virginia just before the close of the war. Recently I visited the same States, and South Carolina and Georgia for the first time since the war. What a transformation! But for the genial climate the busy factories would have recalled New England, while a keen business air had taken the place of that old-time la.s.situde which in ante-bellum days seemed inseparable from the inst.i.tution of slavery. The Southern people have all the acuteness of the Yankee, with a genuine bonhomie which brightens the most ordinary incidents of life. New conditions have called into play valuable qualities which were torpid until touched by the wand of necessity. The old families no longer regard honorable toil with aversion or disdain; on the contrary they are workers, and work is the pa.s.sport to respectable recognition. The Southern whites are getting along very well with the colored people, and look on them as not only useful, but indispensable to the South. "If the negroes emigrate," said a prominent business man of Augusta, Ga., to the writer, "I want to emigrate too." And this is the prevailing sentiment. The negroes, also, are proving themselves worthy of freedom, although it is not to be expected that the effects of three centuries of slavery could be eradicated in three decades of liberty. In looking out for business rivalry New England would do well to gaze less intently across the Atlantic and more toward the Yadkin and the Savannah.

There is little reason to fear for our country. The Union has endured the severest trials, only to come forth stronger than ever from every ordeal.

Grave questions are presenting themselves for solution, but who can doubt that the American people have the brain and the vigor to solve them?

Anarchists make no impression here. Notwithstanding the appeals of alien agitators, Americans remain true to the traditions of the Republic. It is in this deeply implanted reverence for established inst.i.tutions that the hope for the future of America rests. Before it the pestilential vapor of anarchy, borne across the Atlantic from the squirming and steaming ma.s.ses of Europe, disappears like a plague before a purifying flame, and, whatever may be the outcome of the struggle, in its various forms, now going on between the upper and lower orders in the mother continent, in the United States the foundations of society are likely to remain firm and unsapped.