Englishmen and Americans are for the most part the victims of prejudice, and when they meet, too often each one expects to find in the other one who is prepared to depreciate and misunderstand him and his country. They approach each other like two strange dogs who stand head and tail, with bristling hairs, rubbing their ribs together with an angry scowl, for no reason on earth except that they are two dogs.
It may have been my fortune to have effaced some false impressions respecting my countrymen from American minds; but, at all events, I have had an opportunity of divesting myself of much prejudice by a social intercourse with them.
It is asserted that the Americans are great boasters, and I grant that retiring modesty is not the chief characteristic of the race; but it is right to remember, that for a long period, the Americans have been rather depreciated than otherwise, and unmerited depreciation will probably induce a habit of boasting more than anything else. When we tell our friend reprovingly not to blow his own trumpet, we presume that such merit as he possesses will be fully acknowledged. Public opinion has not until latterly dealt fairly with the Americans in all respects, and it is perhaps for this reason that they sound their own praises with stentorian lungs; if they have not been justified in doing so they have at least practically overturned that old saw of our revered ancestors, that “those who talk most do least.�
American character is necessarily very varied, and nowhere is this more clearly perceived than in California, where all classes, freed in a great measure from conventional restrictions, appear in their true garbs. I do not presume to write of American character, I can only record my experience of individuals as I have seen them in the shifting scenes of colonial life; but I think that I have had sufficient intercourse with Americans of all grades to warrant my asserting that foreign historians have too often unfairly paraded their faults, whilst their own writers have in many instances erred equally on the side of their virtues; I believe therefore that there is ample room on our bookshelves for one fair unprejudiced work on the people of the United States of America. Man is ordained to be charitable, and authors are not, that I am aware of, exempted from this command; if, therefore, in writing of a people, a little more pains were taken to discover their virtues, and a less wholesale principle was adopted in regard to the record of their vices, great good might be done to the nation written of and no harm that I know of would accrue to the author. The man who can kindle a warmer feeling in one nation towards another by displacing, with a little judicious reasoning, the prejudices that may affect the latter, waves a stronger wand than the most bitter satirist that ever lived and wrote.
Our vices are generally uppermost; this was exemplified in the “Old Soldier,� for your first acquaintance with that animal might possibly be cemented, as it were, by a kick in the ribs, or a bite on the shoulder; but, recovered from this shock, the longer you knew him the better you liked him; and the old fellow, when once satisfied that you were his friend, would appear to you in a very different light than when under the influence of suspicion, justified, I’ll be bound, by the experience of his life, he attempted to do you a mischief.
I do not wish to compare this poor beast with a man, much less a nation, but the simile serves me so far as to illustrate the fallacy of first impressions as applied either to man or horse; yet, while all acknowledge this for a truism, we find that half the books of travels that analyse so fearlessly the character of the people visited are valueless as commentaries on them, either from hastiness or unfairness of opinion, on the one side, or laboriously-studied partiality on the other. But seldom does the work of an alien run into this latter fault, and most books on America remind me of a volume of Veterinary Surgery, of which, open what page you will, you are met with a description of a curb or a splint, a spavin or a ring-bone, with the author’s directions for a complete cure!
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How small a trifle will disturb, at times, the even current of one’s life; let me recal the sole drawback to our otherwise complete contentment at Tuttle Town.
One of our neighbours had two pigs, and these, like all four-footed animals in the mines, had a roving commission, and lived by nocturnal plunder. This practice we could bear with, as much from our reverence for pork, as from the fact that it was a free country for man or pig. But these wretches took a fancy to scratching themselves, in the dead of night, against the canvas shanty that Rowe and I inhabited; there were plenty of posts, but they preferred a shanty; now, as the only hard substances they could find were our recumbent bodies, as we pressed against the canvas wall, the pigs scratched themselves against us, and as this occurred for about four hours every night, accompanied by the satisfactory grunts which the temporary alleviation of cutaneous disease elicits from the pig, our rest was continually being broken upon. We kept water boiling, and waking up suddenly we would scald them, we harpooned them with crowbars, damaged the vertebræ of their backs with the sharp edges of spades, fired blank cartridges under their noses, and scarified them with a deadly fire of broken bottles; but to no purpose, they would come back and rub us out of bed again regardless of any injury we could do them. The owner of them was absent, and there was no “pound,� honour forbade our shooting them, and we never could catch them to “corral� them. So, for the best part of a twelvemonth, we were nightly roused up by these intruders, who itched so badly that they rubbed our frail tenement out of the perpendicular. Soon they had a litter, and then, while they still rubbed, the little pigs would get under the house and squeal, and although we kept a long pole with a steel fork attached to it, with which we tried to “grain� them, as we do dolphins at sea, yet it was to no purpose, and they did as they liked with us up to the day we left. At first we used to set the dogs at them, but, being savage combatant pigs, rendered reckless by a free life, they would stand at bay with their sterns bulging against our tent, which they evidently mistook for the rock which was “to fly from its firm base as soon as they,� which it nearly did on one or two occasions; moreover, the dogs had enough to do to keep off six donkeys and about a dozen curs, who were generally very musical when the moon was up.
I mention this circumstance because we hear so much of the power of the human will, and I am satisfied that a pig’s will is stronger; and it is, moreover, not only a traveller’s duty to record a fact, but he is expected likewise to discover something new.