Last winter in the United States

by F. Barham Zincke

We very often find a difficulty in getting our horses to take quietly the sound of a railway train in motion. It was at Baltimore that I first saw the locomotive dragging a train along the main street of a city. All the precaution that was taken was merely to ring a bell on the top of the engine to warn foot-passengers and drivers of carriages. Many horses were passed, and many crossed the moving train, but I did not observe that in any instance they took the least notice of it. I afterwards saw the same arrangement at Chicago, at New York, and at many other places, and did not anywhere hear that accidents resulted from it.

A Marylander’s Opinion of Government.

Baltimore was the first place in which I found the general sentiment strongly Southern. Balls and bazaars were being got up, while I was there, for the openly avowed purpose of collecting funds to support those families in the South which had been reduced to poverty by the late war. This made me feel as if I were among another people; for in the North I had heard the South spoken of very vindictively, as ‘that they needed more suffering to take their pride out of them;’ and ‘that nothing could be done with the South till the present proprietors had all been swept away, and Northern men substituted for them.’ I am not aware, however, that I ever heard any remarks of this kind made by persons whom we should describe as of the upper class.

There has been a large emigration to Baltimore, from the States of the late Southern Confederacy, of people who would not live under negro domination as long as they had the means of living elsewhere. Many Northern men also had lately settled there, in expectation that the business of the place would rapidly increase. As it has a fine harbour, and the development of the railway system is now connecting it with the whole of the interior, there appears to be no reason why it should not, at no very distant day, become a dangerous rival of Philadelphia and even of New York. I understood that as many as 4,000 houses were built here in the last twelve months.

‘Sir,’ said a Maryland planter to me, ‘many Americans, of whom I am one, think that the English government is the best in the world. No system of government which, like ours, can breed nothing better than trading politicians, can be either generous or just; and must sooner or later fall, overwhelmed by the hatred of some and the contempt of other sections of the community.’ The same gentleman was of opinion that the animosity felt towards England after the revolutionary war had now almost died out among native-born Americans; for instance, there is, he said, not one Fenian lodge in the whole of New England. Whatever ill-will there may be existing at present originates in the Irish, and radiates from them, if in any instances it has spread beyond them. An Englishman who had been long settled in America, and who took part in the conversation, thought differently. He was of opinion, that at all events a strong prejudice existed in the minds of native-born Americans against the English.

While at dinner at my hotel, a gentleman who was seated opposite to me—he was one of the few stout men, I believe the only one, I saw in America—accosted me with the remark ‘that he could not believe what he understood me to say, that I had not yet been a month in the country, because’—for this was his reason—‘I spoke the language so well. Or if I am to believe it,’ he went on, ‘I suppose you had an American tutor to teach you our language.’ I assured him that he had understood me rightly, and that I had never had the advantage of the instruction he considered necessary, nor was there such a great difference between the language of America and that of England as to make Englishmen feel the need of American tutors. ‘That, sir,’ he replied, ‘is by no means in accordance with my experience. I have myself conversed with Englishmen, and found their language very unlike our own. They seldom know where to use and where not to use the initial H. And their language is full of ungrammatical and vulgar expressions, from which ours is entirely free.’

The Language of America.

This gentleman’s mistake can be easily explained; and the explanation will show that it is one into which an American may very possibly fall. It is a remarkable fact that the English spoken in America is not only very pure, but also is spoken with equal purity by all classes. This in some measure, of course, results from the success of their educational efforts, and from the fact which arises out of it that they are, almost to a man, a nation of readers. But not only is it the same language without vulgarisms, in the mouths of all classes, but it is the same language without any dialectical differences over the whole continent. The language in every man’s mouth is that of literature and of society; spoken at San Francisco just as it is spoken at New York, and on the Gulf of Mexico just as on the great lakes. It is even the language of the negroes in the towns. There is nothing resembling this in Europe, where every county, as in England, or every province and canton, has a different dialect. Of this the philological observer I was dining with was ignorant. He only knew that all Americans spoke uniformly one dialect. He naturally therefore supposed that all Englishmen must do the same; and as his acquaintance with Englishmen was confined to poor immigrants, he imagined that their dialect was the language of all Englishmen.

Often, in parts of the country most remote from each other, in wooden shanties and the poorest huts, I had this interesting fact of the purity and identity of the language of the Americans forced on my attention. And at such times I thought, not without some feelings of shame and sorrow, of the wretched vocabulary, consisting of not more than three or four hundred words, and those often ungrammatically used, and always more or less mispronounced, of our honest and hard-working peasantry. As language is the vehicle of ideas, these poor fellows have not been fairly used, and are being deprived of a large portion of the rich intellectual patrimony of Englishmen.

Will the Debt be Paid?