F. Barham Zincke

“ But after one has seen something of America the feeling is changed into one of wonder at the inexhaustible merits of this grain, and of its incalculable utility to man; and one ceases to be surprised at finding it grown everywhere throughout the Union on so large a scale. It is quite impossible that America could have risen to her present greatness without it. While the hardy pioneer of civilisation was subduing the forest, which reached from the Atlantic to the valley of the Mississippi, there was nothing that could have met his wants as maize did. ”

“ And if a Southern man, from what he reads this morning, thinks that his interests call him to the North, or a Northern man that his call him to the South, the railway, like the piece of carpet in the Eastern story, will transport them hither and thither in a moment. It ensures that there shall be a constant stream of human beings flowing in each direction. Everyone can foresee the result—that there must, sooner or later, be one homogeneous people. ”

“ It is not in the nature of the black that he should ever work hard enough to cultivate the soil, where the climate is such that the European is capable of labouring in it. He has it not in him to become, and never has become, a settler. One cannot imagine half-a-dozen negroes voluntarily submitting for half-a-dozen years to the incessant toil—the ploughing, the sowing, the weeding, the harvesting, the threshing, the cattle-tending of a Northern farm. ”

“ 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. ”

“ We have to establish schools for other people’s children. With them those who pay for the school profit by it. With us those who will pay for the school will never derive any advantage from it. The point for us to settle is, How shall farmers and landlords be made to tax themselves for the education of labourers’ children; and how shall the householders, and professional men, and tradesmen of a town be made to tax themselves for the schooling of the children of artisans and operatives? The Americans may be left to manage the business themselves, for it is their own affair. ”

“ They hate aristocracy, as if it were the foul fiend in human society; and of all aristocracies they hate that of England the most, because they regard it as the purest type the world exhibits of this mighty evil. We may be sure, then, that there is nothing they would not do to humble the aristocracy of England. Theirs is a philosophical, instinctive, active, implacable hatred. And the vogue and influence of it is just in proportion to the strength of the German element in American society. ”

“ But not only is it the same language without vulgarisms, in the mouths of all classes, but it is the same language without any dialectical differences over the whole continent. The language in every man’s mouth is that of literature and of society; spoken at San Francisco just as it is spoken at New York, and on the Gulf of Mexico just as on the great lakes. It is even the language of the negroes in the towns. ”

“ It is true that they pursue the dollar more energetically, intelligently, and successfully than any other people, but no mistake can be greater than that of supposing that they pursue it exclusively. First there is no other country in the world in which the political sentiment is so widely diffused, and so deeply felt; where so much time and thought are devoted to it; where it calls forth so much hard intellectual work in the forms of writing, reading, and speaking. And this is true not of one, but of all classes, from the top to the bottom of society. ”

“ We are often told that the character of a nation in some degree depends on its kitchen. A traveller therefore who understands all that will be expected of him when he returns home, will not pass by unnoticed the style of cookery, and the materials with which it deals, of the people among whom he makes what I heard in this country called, not unaptly, ‘a tour of observation’; and cookery, whether he chooses to observe it or not, is a matter which at all events is submitted to his observation two or three times a day.
The fact that first struck me in American ‘living’ was its abundance. ”

“ 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 or spirituel in 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. ”

“ I very much preferred this to having the white waiters I had fallen in with at the Fifth Avenue Hotel in New York: the latter, I thought, felt the degradation of their position. In America, waiting in hotels and railway cars, being domestic servants, and keeping barbers’ shops, are the only employments, with the exception of field-labour in the South, which are really left open to the coloured race. For a white man, therefore, to become a waiter at an hotel, is to sink himself to the level of the black. It is impossible to conceive a native American placing himself in such a situation. ”

“ There is every prospect of a larger proportion of America, than of Europe, producing wine; in that case the same proportion of its inhabitants will become a wine, and not a beer, or spirit-drinking population. In Europe we attribute certain differences of national character to this difference in the beverage of a people. It appears as if, in this highly-favoured region, upon which Nature has heaped all her gifts, that nothing in the way of climate, occupation, or even food, which can diversify life and character, will be wanting. ”

“ The most striking difference between our parliamentary system and the American Congress is, that ours is as perfect a school as is conceivable for statesmanship, while theirs can never be anything of the kind, except accidentally and in a very slight degree. With us a man who is destined for public life enters Parliament while still young. ”

“ And as many of them (the practice being general among all the denominations) are embellished with towers or spires, their redeeming effect on the appearance of the town is very considerable.
As I am on the subject of American towns, I trust that my friends in that part of the world will excuse me for never having been persuaded by them to fall into ecstacies at the contemplation of the plan of Philadelphia, which they point to with feelings of enthusiasm, as the very perfection of taste and judgment in the art of building cities. ”

“ The fact is that the Americans are the most reasonable and teachable people in the world. Prove to an Englishman that he is wrong, and he will cling to his mistake more closely than before. Prove to the Americans that they are wrong, and the whole people will, as if they were one man, readily abandon their mistake. ”

“ Four or five years ago Denver was what Shyenne is now. But lynch law has purified it, and in a way in which ordinary law has never purified any community in the world. All the rogues and violent fellows have been hanged, and all the suspected have been made to clear out. There are now no other such eight thousand souls in any part of the Old States. A man who knows both would rather leave his baggage out all night in the street at Denver than in any city of New England. This is the state into which a community has been brought when lynch law hands it over to ordinary law. ”

“ The hundreds of thousands of men who in the North left their countinghouses, their farms, and their drawing-rooms, to risk health, and limb, and life for an idea, are just so many hundreds of thousands of arguments against it. And in some respects the argument from the South is still stronger, for there a still larger proportion of the people went to greater hardships, more cruel wants and sufferings, and to a deadlier warfare, inasmuch as the same regiments had more frequently to meet the enemy. In every family I visited in the South I heard tales of suffering and of heroism. ”

“ In grandeur and hardihood it transcended all that had yet been achieved. Not a narrow sea, but the broad Atlantic had to be crossed; not a small island, but a new world had to be occupied. The English race must itself be sifted, and none but those who have nerve as firm as that of the Pilgrim Fathers, and the most active instinct of progression, can take part in this mighty enterprise. And so it comes to pass that America is peopled with that which is most enterprising and progressive in that race in which these qualities had been most highly developed. ”

“ That overthrew the empire, and for a time disorganised society; it, however, did not extend the language of the Fatherland into Italy, Spain, or France. But here is a continuous stream of between 200,000 and 300,000, every year coming, not with sword and torch to slay and to burn, or to perish themselves, but with the axe and the plough to clear away the forest, and to cultivate the soil. Every one that comes is taken up into that entity which will be the America of the future. What then will be the effect? Many Americans fear that it will not be good. ”

“ It becomes, then, a kind of rule of three sum: if Nature, unaided, supported without fail so many millions of large herbivorous animals, how many more will she support when aided by the care and forethought of man? Convert in your mind these countless herds of buffalo into sheep and oxen, and then multiply the result twenty fold, for that amount may easily be reached, when American flock-masters and herd-masters shall have taken possession of the plains, and parcelled them out into manageable ranches, turning the whole of the surface to account. ”

“ They are grand in themselves to the eye; but how much grander does the sight become, when it is accompanied by the thought that what you see is the collected outflow of all those vast lakes it has been taking you so many days to steam over and along, lakes on all of which you lost sight of the land, just as if you had been on the ocean itself, lakes larger than European kingdoms. ”

“ The towns become wealthy and flourishing in proportion to the wealth of the country. These tens of myriads, then, of farmhouses, each of which is evidently the home of a well-to-do family, and of which one is never out of sight in the settled districts of the North, are the truest and most interesting indications of the nature and of the amount of the riches of the United States. ”

“ Even here, in England, one pities the man whom circumstances have made a footman—when one sees the hosts of men occupied in this way in London and elsewhere, and compares what they are, and their sad prospects, with the fine manly fellows they might have been, and the independence they might have secured for themselves and their children in Canada, the Western States, Brazil, on the Rio Plata, in Natal, Australia or New Zealand, or in other places where the climate is fine, land a drug, and the only thing wanted is men who can work as Englishmen and their descendants alone can and do. ”

“ Here, too, at this very spot, at its southern point, the countless buffalo used to drink the water of the Lake, and here it was that the red man was waiting to welcome him; and now the white man is ploughing, and harvesting, and building cities all around its shores, and its waters are wafting to this great central depôt the produce of his labours, and then bearing it away again, to feed the millions of New England and of the distant seaboard cities, and even to aid the deficient supplies of Old England and France. ”