Last winter in the United States

by F. Barham Zincke

There is no secret as to the various means resorted to for carrying out these unnatural resolutions. They are advertised in every newspaper, and there are professors of the art in abundance, judging from the advertisements, in every city. There is one large establishment in the most fashionable street in the city of New York, from whence the great high priestess of this evil system dispenses her drugs and advice, and where also she receives those who need her direct assistance. These things are so notorious and are so much talked of, that one is absolved from the necessity of being at all reticent about them.

No one, of course, would suppose that any practice of this kind, so abhorrent to our best natural instincts, could become universal: nor is it so in America: many denounce it. But still it spreads; and we cannot expect that it will die away, as long as the motives which prompt it continue to be felt as strongly as they are at present.

I will note one of the evil consequences of the practice. When those who have acted in this unnatural way are no longer young, and the motives which prompted their conduct have ceased to have any weight, the husband and wife find that there is no tie between them. They have no reason to respect each other. Each condemns the other, and is in the other’s presence self-condemned. And this is one of the causes of the numerous divorces which so much astonish those who look into the social conditions of American life. Nature and our common moral sense will avenge themselves for such outrages.

Life-wrecks in America.

A stranger travelling in America is not likely to receive letters to any except prosperous persons, and so, unless he is on his guard against it, his personal experience is likely to be confined to the bright and splendid side of society. 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. But I do not suppose that this will account for everything. After all, the careers that are open to city-bred young men are very limited. Practically for them there is not much beyond the counting-house and the store. Farming, the great employment of the country, is repulsive to them; and the ranks of the law are generally recruited from the hard-headed and enterprising sons of farmers. But be the cause what it may, there stands the fact that in the large American cities, and of course nowhere to such an extent as in New York, there is to be found a large class of young men of very limited means, who are living dissipated lives, and whose great aim is to appear fashionable—a detestable word, and a vulgar and unmanly idea, of which we in the old country have not heard much since the times of the Regency.

The case of the women who fail in life is more sad than that of the men, because, while they have less control over their own destinies, the failure in establishing a happy home is to them the failure of everything. The impracticable theory of social equality, I was again led to believe, was frequently the cause of such failures. These young women have been brought up in precisely the same way as their more fortunate sisters, at the same or at similar schools. This makes, in after life, the distinctions that meet the eye—of dress, equipage, and position—enter like iron into the soul; and so the determination to appear as others do becomes the rock upon which the happiness of many is wrecked.

These, however, are matters upon which a stranger will be very distrustful of his own observation, and will always hold himself open to correction from those upon the phenomena of whose social life he is commenting.

The Hub of the World.

I will append to the foregoing remarks on the way in which many young persons in American cities make a wreck of their life’s chances, an outline of the course I observed many families ran in America. The son of a farmer, we will say in Massachusetts, has some ambition. There is no field for ambition in New England farming. He therefore goes to Boston, or some commercial town, and becomes a lawyer, or a merchant, or a professional man of some kind or other. He rises to wealth and distinction, which are not so often secured by the city-born as by those who have the energy and vigour of new blood fresh from the country. He leaves his family well off. They never go back to the country. If any of the children have the energy and vigour of the father, they do not enter into business in Boston, but go out to the west, and help to build up such places as Chicago and Omaha. But if, as is generally the case, they have not energy and vigour enough for this, they go to New York, or some large city, where refined society and amusements are to be had. Some travel much, and take life easily. Some occasionally enter into political life. They marry city ladies, who are possessed of great refinement, but have very bad constitutions. They have two or three children with long thin fingers and weak spines. There is no fourth generation.

An Englishman cannot feel towards Americans as he does towards Italians or Frenchmen. Wherever in America he sees a piece of land being cleared and settled, or a church or a school being built, he looks on as if something were being done by and for his own countrymen. There is, however, one thing the evil effects of which he regrets to see everywhere, and that is the restrictions by which his American brethren are everywhere limiting trade and production. As he goes through their vast continent, and visits region after region, each capable of producing some different commodity the world needs, in sufficient quantities for the wants of all civilised nations, he rejoices at the greatness of their prospects, at the contemplation of all the wealth that God has given them. And he feels certain that the day cannot be very distant when they themselves will make the discovery that a dollar’s worth of wheat, or maize, or cotton, or tobacco, or pork—and, when the plains shall be turned to account, of beef, or mutton, or wool—is exactly equal in value to a dollar’s worth of manufactured goods, and two dollars’ worth is exactly twice the value, and a hundred dollars’ worth is of exactly a hundred times the value. And that when they shall have made this discovery they will strike off the fetters from trade and production, and by a single vote of their legislature increase the national wealth no one can foresee how many fold; and thus make themselves, what their vast and all-producing country, commanding both oceans and placed midway between Europe and Asia, is only waiting to become—the hub of the world.