From Dublin to Chicago: Some Notes on a Tour in America

by George A. Birmingham

After breakfast, when the train had passed the snow-covered region and the air became a little warmer, we sat on the platform at the end of the observation car and looked out at the country through which we were going. Nothing could conceivably be more monotonous. The land was quite flat, the railway line was absolutely straight. The train sped on at a uniform pace of about forty miles an hour. As far back as the eye could see were the rails of the track, narrowing and narrowing until they looked like a single sharp line, ruled with remorseless precision from some point at an infinite distance in the east. On each side of us were broad spaces of flat land, reaching, still flat, to the horizons north and south of us. Every half-hour or so we passed a village, a collection of meanly conceived, two-storied houses with a hideous little church standing just apart from them. Hour after hour we rushed on with no other change of scenery, no mountain, no lake, no river, just flat land, with a straight line ruled on it. It was incredibly monotonous. I suppose that the life of the people who inhabit that region is as interesting, in reality, as any other life. The seasons change there, I hope. Harvests ripen, cows calve, men die; but on us, strangers from a very different land, the unvarying flatness of it all lay like an intolerable weight.

Yet that journey gave me, more than anything else I saw, a sense of the greatness of the American people. There is, I suppose, some one thing in the history of every nation which impresses the man who realizes, even dimly, the meaning of it, more than anything else does. Elizabethan England's buccaneering adventures to the Spanish main seem to me to make intelligible the peculiar greatness of England more than anything else her people have ever done. Revolutionary France in arms against Europe is France at her most glorious, with her special splendor at its brightest. So my imagination fixes on America's settlement of her vast central plain as the greatest thing in her story. Her fight for independence was fine, of course; but many other nations have fought such wars and won, or, just as finely, lost. Her civil war stirs thoughts of greatness in any one who reads it. But this tremendous journey of the American people from the east to the Mississippi shores, halfway across a continent, was something greater than any war.

First, no doubt, hunters went out from the narrow strip of settled seaboard land. They pushed their adventurous way across the Alleghanies, finding passes, camping in strange fastnesses. They came upon the westward-flowing waters of the great network of rivers which drain into the Mississippi. They made their long, dim trails. They fought, with equal cunning, bands of Indian braves. They returned, in love with wildness, weaned from the ways of civilization, to tell their tales of strange places by the firesides of sober men. Or they did not return. They were great men, and their achievements very great, but not the greatest.

More wonderful was the accomplishment of those long streams of settlers who crossed Virginia and Pennsylvania to find the upper reaches of the waterways which should lead and bear them mile by mile to the Mississippi shore. It is barely a century since these men, home lovers, not wanderers with the call of the wild in their ears, home builders, not hunters, went floating in rude arks down the Ohio, the Cumberland, the Tennessee. With unimaginable courage and faith they took with them women, children, cattle, and household plenishing. Somewhere each ark grounded and the work of settlement began. I saw the woods which stretch for miles over rolling hills and round lakes beyond that curious colony of very wealthy people at Tuxedo. My imagination pictured for me, as I gazed at these woods, the outpost settlements of one hundred years ago. The "half-faced camp," rudest of the dwellings of civilized man, was built. Trees were "girdled" or cut down with patient toil. A small clearing was made amid the interminable miles of forest land. I imagined the men, lean and grim, the anxious women, ever on the alert because of the perpetual menace of the Indians who might lurk a stone's throw off among the shadows of the trees.

We can guess at the satisfaction of each triumph won; the day when the lean-to shed with its open side gave place to the log hut, still rude enough; the day when some great tree, sapless from its "girdling," was hewn down at last; the adding of acre after acre of cleared land; the incredibly swift growth of villages and towns; the pushing out of settlements, south and north, into yet stranger wildernesses, away from the friendly banks of the waterways. The courage and endurance of these settlers must have been far beyond that required of soldiers, explorers or adventurers. Step by step, almost literally step by step, they made this wonderful journey, conquering every acre as they passed it. Yet we know very little about them. Homer made a list of the ships which sailed for Troy. Who has chronicled the arks and rafts of these still braver men? Camoens wrote his Luciad to glorify the voyage of Vasco da Gama round the African coast. All England's Elizabethan literature is, rightly understood, an interpretation of the spirit of Drake and Raleigh. No one has written an epic of these American pioneer settlers. Yet surely if ever men deserved such commemoration they did.

Our train ran on and on at forty miles an hour, and my spirit was cowed by the vast monotony. What sort of spirit had the men who faced it first, to whom the conquest of a mile was a great achievement, to whom it must have seemed that there was no end to it at all? I wonder whether there was in them some great kind of faith, of which we have lost the secret now, a belief that God Himself had bidden them go forward? Or perhaps there was strong in them that instinct for the conquest of nature which, whether he knew it or not, has always been in man, which has made him greater than the beasts, only a little lower than the angels. Or perhaps it was hunger for life itself, not for a fuller or a richer life, but for the bare material existence, which sent them on, threatened by want in civilized places, to look for ground where things would grow, where the fruit of their toil would not be taken from them. To find a parallel for the achievement of these men the mind must go back to dim ages before history began, when our ancestors—why and how we cannot guess—learned to light fires, chip flints, snare beasts, make laws; groped through a palpable obscurity toward justice and right, fought those impossible battles of theirs which have won for us the kingship of the world. Theirs was an achievement greater indeed than that of America's pioneer settlers, but of the same kind.

I went to church in New York on Thanksgiving Day, and I, though a stranger, was given the privilege of reading aloud that wonderful chapter in the Book of Deuteronomy which tells how God led His people through a great and terrible wilderness. I forgot, as I read it, all about Israel and Sinai. I remembered how the people among whom I was had journeyed across their vast continent. They are not my people. Their glory is none of mine. Their Thanksgiving Day had nothing to do with me, but emotion thrilled me strangely as I read. I wondered, thanked, and bent my head with fear, so great was the past which is remembered, so terrible the warning which follows the recital. "Beware lest thou at all forget the Lord thy God."

The observation car, with its sheltered platform at the back of it, is a pleasant feature of the long-distance American train, one which might, with advantage, be copied in Europe. But the best thing, the most wholly satisfactory, about American railway traveling is that certain trains are fined for being late. This happens in England, I think, certainly in Ireland, in the case of mail trains. It does them a lot of good, but gives small gratification to the suffering passengers, because the Post-Office authorities take the money. In America the passengers get the fine. Our train was an hour and a quarter late in getting to Chicago, and we were handed a dollar each as compensation for our annoyance. I felt sorrier than ever that we had not traveled the day before in the train that was delayed by the blizzard. Then we should have got eighteen dollars each and been able to buy several splendid dinners to make up for our starvation.

It is not every train in America which pays for unpunctuality in this way. I am not sure that the rule applies even to express trains all over the continent, nor do I know whether the railway companies deal thus justly with their passengers of their own free will. It seems very unlikely that they do. I am inclined to think that there must be a law on the subject, either a law made by the State of Illinois or, as I hope, one made by Congress itself. However this may be, I have no doubt at all that the law, if it is a law, ought to be made and strictly enforced in every civilized country. I traveled once by a London & North Western Railway express train, which was three hours late; and I suffered a loss, was actually obliged to disperse no less a sum than £2-18-0 in consequence. I tried in vain to make the company see that it ought to pay me back that £2-18-0. I never got a penny. Yet the offense of the American company was a trifling one in comparison. It was one hour and a quarter late in a journey supposed to occupy twenty-three hours. The London & North Western Railway took nine hours over a journey which it professed to do in six. I cannot help feeling that the English company would have got its train to London on that occasion much more rapidly if it had known beforehand that it might have to pay each passenger fifteen shillings at Euston. We hear a great deal on this side of the Atlantic about the scandalous way in which American railway magnates control American legislation. It appears that occasionally, at all events, the legislators exercise a very salutary control over the railways.

Charges of corrupting senates are certainly made against American railway directors. They may conceivably be true. If they are it seems desirable, in the interests of the passengers, that some of the British railways would take in hand the task of corrupting the House of Commons in the American way. The morals of that assembly could in no case be much worse than they are, so there would be little loss in that way, while the gain to the public would be immense if trains, even a few of the best trains, were forced under heavy penalties to keep time.