The Americans having now revolutionised throughout the whole country the method of serving hotel dinners, passing at one step from what was the worst method of all to what is greatly in advance of the practice in this matter of all other nations, I would venture to suggest another change in a matter of still greater importance. It is evident that civilisation would have been quite an impossibility, if people had not met together at meals for the purpose of conversation. This alone rescues the act of taking one’s food from its animal character, and associates it with the exercise of our moral and intellectual qualities. 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. The savage hurries over his meals because he is a savage, morally and intellectually near of kin to the brute. If he could tarry over his meals he would have ceased to be a savage. All ancient and modern nations that have been highly civilised have acted instinctively on this idea. The Attic symposia, as well as the French petits soupers, rested upon it. Suppose meals are to be silently hurried through, they become mere brutish acts of eating and drinking, which any animal can perform as well as ourselves, and in much less time too. It is here that the Americans have a grand opportunity, in their widely diffused and generally practised hotel life, of which, it seemed to me, they were not availing themselves. You will see people day after day sit down to the same table, take their food in silence, and leave the table without a word having been spoken. You may observe several tables occupied at the same time in your neighbourhood, and there shall be no conversation going on at any one of them. Those who sit at them appear to be entirely occupied either with their own thoughts or with attention to what they are eating. But it would make hotel life far more agreeable, and impart to it a far greater amount of civilising power, if it were the rule that people who meet at the same table might converse with one another, without any previous acquaintance, and without any necessity for subsequent acquaintance. Let it be understood that on such occasions conversation is the correct and the civilised thing.
No American will ever undertake any of the lower forms of labour—very few of the men before the mast in American ships are native-born. The class of agricultural labourers is unknown among them. What labour they have of this kind is supplied by immigration. No American would become a footman or hotel waiter. Their railways were not made by American navvies. In the North all the lower kinds of labour—but which, though they rank low as employments, are still necessary to the well-being, even to the existence of society—have hitherto fallen to the lot of the Irish, English, and German immigrants. Their place has been taken in the South by the blacks, and in the Pacific States by the Chinese.
The Future of the Servile Classes.
This suggests two very interesting questions. The first is, Can a republic be carried on without a servile class? What would be the state of things in the American Union if it were deprived of the services of the Irish, the blacks, and the Chinese? Of course the loss would be much felt, and would very much retard the progress of the country; but I do not think that it would be a loss that would be irremediable and ruinous. As soon as the country begins to fill up, there will begin to appear in America the class that has existed in every country in the world, composed of those who have neither property nor a knowledge of any trade (which can seldom be obtained by those who have no property), and who therefore have nothing to live upon except their power of doing rude and unskilled work.
The other question is, What will be the future in the American Republic of these three races? The African, we may be sure, will either die out, which is most probable, or become a low caste, the pariahs of the New World: retail trade and a few of the lower kinds of labour and employment will be open to them. They will possess civil but not political rights. The Irish will be absorbed into the general population; and so one may speculate to what extent this will affect the American character. The Chinese can never be absorbed. What therefore will be the position that they will occupy in the Union fifty or a hundred years hence? Hitherto only one State has been open to them, that of California. Can anything be inferred from the position they have created for themselves in that State? I think we may be safe in supposing that, as they have already crossed the Pacific to the number of sixty thousand, when by the completion of the Pacific Railway the whole of the Union is thrown open to them, they will not remain cooped up in California. In a few years I believe they will be found in New York, and in all the large cities of the west and east. Voltaire said that the true wall of China was the American continent, the interposition of which saved it from European invasion; but it appears now that the American continent is the very point at which the European races will be invaded by the long pent up population of China. To what extent will this invasion be carried? and what consequences will result from it? One thing, I think, may be foreseen—the Americans will not admit these Asiatics, aliens in religion as well as in race, to political equality with themselves.
A recent writer on America has informed us that there is a disinclination among the wives of the luxurious cities of the Atlantic seaboard to become mothers. I found, after enquiry made everywhere on the spot, that this indisposition to bring up children is not confined to the wives or to the cities this writer’s words indicate, but is participated in, to a large extent, by the husbands, and is coextensive with the American Union. It is just as strongly felt at Denver, two thousand miles away, as at New York, and results in almost as much evil at New Orleans as at Chicago.
Limitation of Offspring.
The feeling—or, it might be said, this absence of natural feeling—may easily be explained. The expenses and annoyances of house-keeping are in America very great; and young couples, except when they are rich—and such cases must always form a small minority—generally escape them by living in hotels. Hotel living is always according to tariff, so much a week for each person. To a couple living in this way, and barely able to find the means for it, the cost of every additional child can be calculated to a dollar, and is seriously felt. As long as they are without children they may get on comfortably enough, and go into society, and frequent places of amusement. But if encumbered with the expense of a family, they will have to live a far quieter and less gay life. They cannot give up their autumn excursion, they cannot give up balls, and dresses, and concerts, and carriages. Therefore the husband and wife come to an understanding that they will have but one child, or that they will have no children at all.
Another reason for the practice, which would appear to affect the wife only, but which has frequently much weight with the husband also, is that the American lady’s reign is not, under any circumstances, a long one. She has generally considerable personal attractions, but the climate and the habits, of living are so trying that beauty is very short-lived. The young wife therefore argues, ‘My good time will under any circumstances be short; why, therefore, should I prematurely dilapidate myself by having half-a-dozen children? And indeed what would that come to, but that I should have no good time at all, for the whole of it would be given up to the nursery? And by the time this would be over, I should be nothing but a wreck; my good looks will have disappeared, and I shall have fallen into premature old age.’
I met with husbands who themselves justified the practice on these grounds. They did not wish to have their wives, during the whole period of their good looks, in the nursery.