Last winter in the United States

by F. Barham Zincke

Strange as it may sound, the traveller sometimes finds it difficult to carry on an argument with an American, on account of his complete ignorance of the subject upon which he will go on arguing; or, worse still, from his wonderful misconceptions, for some of which he may possibly be indebted to rural orators and rural newspapers. I was in this way myself often reminded of what a well-known American editor said to me—of course very much exaggerating the fact; still, however, his remark may have some grains of truth in it, ‘that his countrymen were, and must long continue to be, in matters out of their own business, and beyond their own country, the most ignorant people in the civilised world.’

Another difficulty one occasionally meets with is that you do not know how much you are to discount from the speaker’s grand phrases, in order to arrive at his own meaning; for it sometimes happens that the ideas that are in his own mind are very inadequate to the language he uses to express them. I was, for instance, for several days thrown into close contact with a very gentlemanly, well-spoken, well-mannered merchant, who had seen something of the world, for his business had frequently taken him to South America and to Europe. On one occasion he astonished me by affirming ‘that the farmers, of all classes in the United States, possessed the finest intellects.’ Anybody else would have meant by these words, that among them were to be found the most powerful and most cultivated intellects—minds great in imaginative power, or in the power of apprehending political, or speculative, or scientific truth. But of these uses of the intellect my companion had not so much as the germ of a conception. To nothing of this kind had his sight ever reached. What he meant by the finest intellect was just this: a mind capable of giving a pretty correct practical judgment on the ordinary occurrences of daily business. At another time the same gentleman startled me by the announcement ‘that many of the blacks were very fine scholars.’ After a time it became evident that he had no conception of scholarship beyond the elements of reading and writing, and the power of keeping accounts accurately. If a man had attained to the point of doing these things with ease, he had achieved everything; for my companion had caught no glimpse of anything beyond.

What one may Repeat.

No one, I suppose, will so mistake my meaning as to imagine that I mention anecdotes of this kind with any wish to raise a laugh at the expense of the people I travelled among. It seems almost impertinent to remark that there are plenty of people in America who are very well informed, and plenty of people who express their ideas with perfect correctness. Their system, however, of equal education, and of equal chances to all, brings a great many to the front (and small blame to them for such a result), who—this I suppose to have been the history of the casual fellow-traveller whose expressions I have just repeated—never had any education but that of the common primary schools, and never afterwards had time for reading anything but newspapers, and never attempted to master anything except the details of their own business. This must be the case with many. Many others, however, there are, as is very well known, who have used what was acquired at the common primary school as a foundation for a solid and extensive structure of after acquisitions.

My object is to give a correct idea of America, and of the different kinds of Americans the traveller in the United States meets with, as they were seen by myself. If omissions are made, this object cannot be answered, and so what I might say would convey only erroneous conceptions. One is generally precluded from making any reference to what he saw or heard in private houses; but there are no reasons for silence as to what took place at tables-d’hôte, and in railway cars, on board steam-boats, and in coaches: all this was said and done in public. And besides, most of the people who in America make laughable observations would, considering the point from which they started, have had no observations at all to make, had their lot been cast on this side the water, or anywhere else excepting in the United States.

‘Sir,’ said a gentleman to me one morning at breakfast (we were seated together at a small table in one of the large hotels of a great city in the Valley of the Mississippi),—‘Sir, have you seen our Forest?’ ‘Sir,’ I replied, ‘for the last thousand miles and more, since I left Richmond, I have scarcely seen anything else.’

‘Sir,’ my interrogator responded with an indignant tone, ‘I am not speaking of the material, but of the intellectual Forest—of our Forest—the great Forest—the grandest delineator of the sublime and of the ridiculous in the united world.’ I afterwards found that this grand delineator of the ridiculous was the actor Forest, who is not unknown professionally in this country, and who was playing in the town I was then staying at. I also found that his admirer was a dealer in ready-made clothes, who took his meals at the hotel.

‘Sir,’ observed to me a gentleman who was sitting next to me in a car of the Pacific Railway, ‘these rails will carry the commerce of the world.’ I requested him to repeat his remark. I then began to reply by saying, that I thought it not improbable that as much of what was used for tea in the United States as was grown in China would pass over them, when he cut me short with, ‘Sir, it is not to be expected that strangers should understand the grandeur of our country, but these rails will carry the commerce of the world.’ This dealer in prophecy was also a dealer in whisky.

Letters of Introduction.

Wherever you may be in the United States, you will not find it difficult to obtain letters of introduction to any town in the Union. If an American traveller were to ask an English friend at Ipswich for introductions to Exeter, Galway, Dundee, Carlisle, and Dover, his friend would not find it easy to comply with the request. But if the position of the two were reversed, and the Englishman were travelling in America, and were to ask his American friend for introductions to half-a-dozen places in the States, far more distant from each other than the places I have mentioned in the United Kingdom, the American would either be able to give them himself, or would easily find friends who could. This implies a vast difference in our social system. Ours is a system which isolates, theirs is a system which brings everybody in contact with everybody. One is astonished at the number of acquaintances an American has. For one acquaintance an English gentleman has, an American gentleman will probably have fifty or a hundred.