“He did not seem to be offended,” replied I; “or I should have checked my tongue before he left us.”
“You can never tell when these people are offended,” he rejoined; “but you may rely upon one thing,—they will never forgive you. They lock their wrath up, until a favourable opportunity presents itself for taking summary vengeance. If I were in your place, I would make myself scarce.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“I mean, I would not show myself too much in public, or in society; or perhaps engage my passage to New York.”
“And you call this a free country!” exclaimed I, “and the manners of your people those of high-minded gentlemen! Good manners in other countries consist in putting every one at ease, which may be done without being in the least degree familiar; but here the higher classes seem to be determined upon making every one that is poorer than themselves feel his inferiority, in order to make him as uncomfortable as possible. And all this is done with an affectation of republican simplicity, which makes every species of arrogance only the more offensive as coming from an equal. The Southern people, whom you pronounce much more aristocratic, and who perhaps are so in the English sense of the word, are infinitely more amiable in their manners, merely because their exclusiveness relates to family and education, and because they are not continually in contact with the labouring classes.
“In order to make any kind of aristocracy tolerable, it is necessary that it should, in some shape or other, either protect the lower classes, or never come in contact with them. The aristocracy of the Atlantic cities is unfortunately neither a protector of the lower orders, with whom it is continually wrestling for power; nor is it, from its political position and mode of life, capable of avoiding incessant contact with them. Hence arises a continual jarring: the rich claiming a rank which the poor are unwilling to grant; and the poor provoked by the unprofitable arrogance of the rich, opposing to them a species of insolence which a labouring man in Europe would hardly dare to offer his equals.
“I recollect some time ago having travelled on board of a canal-boat from Harrisburg to Pittsburg. The accommodations on board of these boats, the most bigoted American—and I know I address myself to none such—could not but call miserable; and yet, the majority being satisfied, none dared to murmur. Our meals were shocking; cooked in the worst manner, and served as no man in England would place a piece of bread before a day labourer. During the night we were put on shelves, of which three were placed one above the other at a distance of not more than from sixteen to twenty inches, and so close together that the feet of one person touched the head of his neighbour, and vice versâ. To complete our misery, the cabin was not ventilated, the door being kept closed in order to prevent those who lay next to it from taking cold; and we slept without sheets, the same unwashed and uncleaned blankets having perhaps served in turn to a hundred different pedlars and emigrants. But the ne plus ultra was one of the captains,[4] a New-Englander by birth; a puny, pale, consumptive fellow with sharp grey eyes, thin pointed nose, long deeply-indented chin, and a dash across his face marking the opening of the mouth in the absence of lips. His voice, something between a growl and a grunt, seemed to proceed from a subterraneous cavern; while his hands, carefully concealed in his pockets, indicated, by their position, the usual current of his thoughts.
“This fellow, whom no man of correct judgment would have made keeper of a pack of hounds, used to look upon the whole company with an air of conscious superiority; strutting the deck as if he were commander of a frigate, and scarcely deigning to address a word to any of the passengers. You will excuse me for this digression, which you will readily forgive when you reflect that I but agree with you in the opinion that, much as the New-Englanders are to be esteemed at home,—and there is none more ready to pay homage to their public and private virtue than myself,—they are nevertheless among the dullest, driest, and most disagreeable adventurers one meets abroad. This man had the impudence to serve the same meat three times to his passengers: first, with tea and coffee in the morning; then, with pure water at noon; and lastly, though there was scarcely enough left to feed a dog, the remainder of the dinner was once more brought upon the table in the shape of a supper. Previous to that, we had been kept, as they call it, by a fat round-faced German, who gave us at least plenty to eat, and a friendly face in the bargain; but our Yankee captain seemed to be determined to make the most of our cash, without contracting the irregular polygon of his face into anything approaching a smile.
“Under these circumstances, a German gentleman, who, to judge from his merry voice, and two large bumps of alimentiveness gracing his circular forehead, was fond of humour and good cheer, was amusing the company in tolerable good English with a few unequivocal innuendoes in reference to their English comforts; which were no sooner uttered than the captain, probably thinking that the foreigner was an aristocrat not admiring the institutions of the country, told him that his conversation was ‘most perfectly disgusting,’ and that, if he did not ‘hold his tongue,’ he should be obliged to put him ashore. These, as far as I can recollect, were the very words of the ill-humoured blackguard; and such an effect did they produce on the company that none dared to demonstrate against his insulting conduct, though they whispered to one another that it was not altogether gentlemanly or just.
“Now, this man would not have been half so insolent if the gentleman whom he reprobated had not been decently dressed, so as to lead him to suppose that he wanted to play the aristocrat. It was a species of revenge against what he imagined to be the taunts and sneers of ‘a vulgar upstart,’ who, in spite of his money, resorted to this mode of travelling for the sake of saving expenses.