Then come a more canny couple—two manny-clad, bright-faced boys, Scotch bairns, as their pretty dialect reveals. One is ten and the other eleven years old; and these bit laddies are making the journey all the way alone from Loch Lomond to Loch Michigan; billed and ticketed to their widower father in Chicago. It is a picnic to them, you can see, yet in their childish faces there is a sedate gravity, such as belongs to the earnest race of the Covenanters. Nearly six hundred children last year came thus alone “over the back of the round sea” to seek parents or friends. There are in the United States Senate, in gubernatorial chairs, at the head of great industries, in leading positions of all kinds, other boys who in other years came thus alone to the land of promise. So we despise not the day of small things at Castle Garden, says our attentive chaperon.
The most out-of-place delegate that I saw here was a Bedouin Arab. “What sought he thus afar!” Very tall and slender and sinewy; swarthy skin, black, close-cropped hair, intensely black stubbed beard, behind and amidst which his white teeth, constantly exposed like a bull-dog’s, shine like a battery behind a bristling chevaux de frise. His head is raised, his nostrils dilated, his black, piercing eyes look far away over the unseen crowds; he moves restlessly with a swift, cat-like tread and an undulatory motion of his long, lithe body, like that of a tiger. He seems a veritable wild beast at bay, and I watch from a respectful distance to see him pounce down on some unsuspecting emigrant. Yet might not this animal some day turn up an alderman in a “growing city,” having first studied law? ’Twere not to consider too curiously to consider so; no, faith, not a jot. I admit it were some time a paradox, but now our time gives it proof.
Plenty of romances and not a few tragedies are enacted or consummated here. If the re-unions that take place in this old fort consecrate it to humanity, and make it a temple of affection, its disappointments make it a theater for melodramas and tragedies in reality. Last year one hundred and fifty-three emigrants were sent to the insane asylum on Ward’s Island, East River, a large proportion of whom were young people, and a majority women. They come over to find their mates, and either do not meet them, or worse, find they have lost them indeed. Thence they become aliens to the whole universe and find their only home in the Fantastic Realm. Melancholia is the prevalent form of aberration. The shock of transplanting and the excitement of new scenes upon simple and undeveloped natures are also a pregnant cause of mental overthrow. A little negro boot black, contemplating the insane asylum, said to me reflectively, “I think anybody is foolish to go crazy.” As three-fourths of the crazy ones here are unmarried, it might seem foolish to expose themselves when so simple a remedy is so available as marriage is here.
For Castle Garden is a famous place for weddings. Romances begun in the old country or on shipboard, and eke runaway matches to this distant Gretna Green find fusion here. Plenty of girls also come to America to unanticipated homes. A curious feature of the supply agency of the bureau is its match-making offices. The commissioners are applied to by men in this country for wives—perhaps on the principle that if a man marries he will be compelled to support a German or Irish girl anyway, so he might as well marry one and have done with trouble on that score. Sometimes, also, a man sends by mail his request, as who should say, “Please forward to my address in good order, upon approval, one (1) wife, per express.” The original of the following letter was shown me at the superintendent’s office:
“Fort Cœur d’Alene, Idaho Territory.
“Dear Sir:—Having noticed in the columns of some New York papers that some young men have procured good wives at the Castle Garden, and as I presume that the demand is not equal to the supply, I am desirous of having a good, honest woman for a wife and would make an offer of a comfortable home to a deserving woman. Of course the lady must be consulted about taking her chances in coming out this far, but I am making this offer in good faith and would like an answer as soon as your convenience will permit. My reasons for sending so far are—I am keeping a hotel, stables and ranch on one of the few routes to the newly discovered Cœur d’Alene gold fields, am doing a fair business, am a young bachelor not yet thirty-two, and can’t find a girl of any use to me inside of three hundred miles. So I thought I, being a New Yorker myself, would send and have you try and procure me a life-partner. Hoping this may meet with kind favor I am, yours, etc.,
“M. E. L.”
There is never any difficulty in making up these improvised matches, but the wooers, like young Lochinvar, have to come out from the West and make their own selections. So far as reported, these matches result happily, which goes to show that connubial felicity does not always follow the law of natural selection. Perhaps the matches that are made in Castle Garden are different from those reputed to have been made in heaven.
Somewhat too much of incident.
Is there in all history a human migratory movement like this? Men have always been, like poor Joe, moving on, but generally for conquest or subjugation of other races. No such fusion of bloods has ever before taken place—the nearest approach to it being the amalgamation of races through which the modern Englishman came. But that commingling was always the result of conquest and subjugation, and the antagonistic nature of the union delayed the peaceful fusion and left its impress of belligerency on the resultant race characteristic. In this last Anabasis of Liberty, however, everybody is welcome, all elements are assimilated, everything converted to the uses of empire and the work of peopling a continent with an entirely new race of men—new in blood, thought and aim. Whether as a result of the varied forces of heredity or the unprecedented influences of environment, it is evident that here a new people is being created for a new purpose. The future Greene who shall essay the writing of “The Making of America,” will find in the mutual reaction of race characteristics on each other, in the influence of material surroundings and in the stimulus of free institutions, the profound study of the origin and evolution of the American citizen.