Last winter in the United States

by F. Barham Zincke

One hears a great deal about what is described as the arrogance and conceit of Americans. I never met with anything of the kind, except among classes which with us are generally too ignorant to know much, and too apathetic to care much about their own country. The upper classes are proud of their country, as they ought to be, and that is all. At Boston, however, I was struck, not with the arrogance and conceit, but with the humility of Americans. I am speaking now of the literary class; and I think the phenomenon is to be accounted for in the following way. These New Englanders are the most observant and the most receptive of the human family, and it is the first thought of all among them who have literary aspirations to travel in England and on the European continent. These are to them the Holy Land of thought. It is here that all the branches of literature, and all the departments of science, originated and were matured. All the creations of fancy, all the lessons and examples of history, all the familiar descriptions of outward nature, and of human emotions, come from this side. Here, then, are the shrines which the literary men of the New World must visit with the staff and in the spirit of a pilgrim. They feel an influence which their fellow-countrymen do not feel. But besides this, because they are New Englanders, they note and weigh every idea and practice they find in European society; and everything that approves itself to their understanding, they adopt readily and without prejudice. This is the reason why travelled New Englanders are generally so gentlemanly and agreeable. They understood what they saw abroad, and they have acknowledged to themselves that they have learnt much that they never would have known anything of if they had stayed at home. This, which is true of all, is doubly true of their literary men. One of the leading writers of New England described to me the craving that he felt for intercourse with minds cultivated as they are only in Europe. There only, in his opinion, men had time to think; there only had the critical faculties been trained; there only could you meet with broad and profound views on questions of literature, history, or policy. The whole of the literature of America was but a rechauffé of that of England, France, and Germany.

Humility of the Leading Literary Men.

I regretted the necessity which obliged me to leave Boston before I had seen as much as I wished of its society. I did not feel in this way because it more nearly resembles European society than is the case in any other city of the Union—for one does not go to America to see what can be seen at home—but because I wished to know more of some with whom I felt that it would be a happiness afterwards to be acquainted, and because I was desirous of using every opportunity for arriving at some distinct conclusions as to the tendency of opinion and thought, more particularly religious thought, in the New World.

CHAPTER XXII.

AMERICAN HOTELS—WHY SOME PEOPLE IN AMERICA TRAVEL WITHOUT ANY LUGGAGE—CONVERSATION AT TABLES-D’HÔTE SHOULD BE ENCOURAGED—THE IRISH, THE AFRICAN, AND THE CHINESE—CAN A REPUBLIC DO WITHOUT A SERVILE CLASS?—WHAT WILL BE THE ULTIMATE FATE OF THESE THREE RACES IN AMERICA—NO CHILDREN—MOTIVES—MEANS—CONSEQUENCES—WHY MANY YOUNG MEN AND YOUNG WOMEN MAKE SHIPWRECK OF HAPPINESS IN AMERICA—THE COURSE MANY FAMILIES RUN—AMERICA THE HUB OF THE WORLD.

During the week I was at Boston, I dined for the last time in an American hotel; for the fortnight I afterwards spent in my second visit to New York, I passed in the hospitable house of Mr. Henry Eyre, a brother of the Rector of Marylebone, and a worthy representative of Englishmen in the commercial capital of America. With this exception, at the close of my tour, I made it a rule, from which I never departed, to decline all invitations to stay in private houses. My reason for doing this was, that I might come and go as I pleased, and have my time always at my own disposal. This gave me abundant opportunities, as my travels extended over 8,000 miles of American ground, for forming an estimate of their hotels and hotel life. With a few exceptions here and there, in some of the large eastern cities, the hotels are on the monster scale, and managed on the American system. The exceptions are called English, or European hotels, and their speciality is that you only pay in them for what you have. On the American system you pay so much a day for board and lodging; liquors and washing being extras. That the American system is the cheapest and most convenient, is demonstrated by its universality. The few exceptions that exist have to be inquired after and sought out. A traveller will also avoid them, because he is desirous of seeing the manners and customs of the people; and these can nowhere be seen so readily, and to such an extent, as in the monster hotels. They are a genuine production of the soil, are in perfect harmony with American wants and ideas, and are all alike.

American Hotels.

Their distinguishing features are that the greater part of their guests are not travellers, but lodgers and boarders; and that they have one fixed charge for all, of so many dollars a day. The dearest I entered was the Fifth Avenue Hotel at New York, which charged five dollars a day; the board consisting of five such meals as no hotel in England or Europe could supply without bankruptcy. They are enabled to do this, because they have to supply these meals for several hundred persons. And they have this large number of guests, because multitudes of families, that they may escape the expense and annoyances of house-keeping, live in the hotels, and multitudes of men in business, keeping only a counting-house or a store in the city, do the same. The cheapest I was ever in charged three dollars and a half a-day. The service is so well organised in these hotels, that you may come or go at any hour of the night; and you can get your linen washed and returned to your room in a few hours. While dressing one morning at the Sherman House at Chicago, I sent out my linen to the laundry; on going back to my room at half-past eleven, I found that it had been washed and returned. This rapidity with which the washing of linen is performed in America enables one to travel with much less than would be requisite in Europe; and it explains why one often sees people travelling in America with no more than they can carry in a little hand-bag, called, in the language of the country, a satchel.

It does not, however, explain why some people in America travel with no luggage at all. Some of those whom I observed entering and leaving the cars in this light and unimpeded fashion, told me they had adopted the system because the work of the washerwoman had been advancing among them, not more in rapidity than it had done in costliness, so that it was now cheaper to get a new article, something at the same time being allowed for the old soiled one, than to send one of the same species to the laundry of the hotel. By acting on this idea they had escaped the necessity of taking with them relays of linen. I suppose this system must be an encouragement to the trade in paper shirt-collars. The difficulty as to razors, brushes, and combs, is easily met by the provision made in the barber’s shop of every hotel. The Americans are full of original ideas, and they are very great travellers; it was therefore to be expected that they would be the first people to organise and perfect a system of travelling like the birds of the air.

Conversation at Meals.