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

by George A. Birmingham

Having failed in the steamboat office, I wrote a letter to a high American official in England—not the Ambassador. I did not like to trouble him about a sealskin coat. An English official, high, or of middling station, would have answered me by return of post, because he is glad of an opportunity of writing a letter. In fact, he likes writing letters so much that he would have sent me two answers, the first a brief but courteous acknowledgment of my letter and an assurance that it was receiving attention; the second an extract from the Act of Parliament which dealt with my particular problem. The American official does not like writing letters. No American does. Rather than write a letter, an American will pursue you, viva voce, over hundreds of miles of telephone wire, or spend an hour of valuable time in having an interview with you in some more or less inaccessible place. Not even promotion to a high official position will cause an American to feel kindly toward a pen. The official to whom I wrote would, I am sure, have told me all there is to know about the American dislike of sealskin coats, if he could have got me on a telephone. He could not do that, because my name is not in the London telephone directory. He would, although he is a most important person and I am less than the least, have come to me and talked face to face if he had known where to find me; but I wrote from a club, and the chances were five to one at least against his finding me there. There was nothing for it but to write a letter; but it took him several days to make up his mind to the effort. His answer, when he did write it, followed me to New York, and the sealskin coat problem had solved itself then.

I noticed, when in New York, that it takes a posted letter much longer to get from one street in that city to another quite near at hand than it does in London for a letter posted in the same way to get from Denmark Hill to Hampstead. I connect this fact with the dislike of letter-writing which is prevalent among Americans. But I do not know which is cause and which is effect. It may be that the American avoids letters because he knows that they will go to their destination very slowly. It may be, on the other hand, that the American post-office has dropped into leisurely ways because it knows that it is seldom used for business purposes. Love letters it carries, no doubt, for it is difficult to express tender feelings on a telephone, and impossible to telegraph them; but love letters are hardly ever urgent. The "Collins" or "Hospitable Roof" communication must be a letter and must go through the post, but the writer and the recipient would both be better pleased if it never arrived at all. Business letters are different things, and I am sure the American post-office carries comparatively few of them.

I wish that some one with a taste for statistics would make out a table of the weights of the mail bags carried on Cunard steamers. I am convinced, and nothing but statistics will make me think differently, that the westward bound ships carry far more letters than those which travel eastward. All Englishmen, except for obvious reasons English journalists, write letters whenever they have a decent excuse. Americans only write letters when they must. It was, I think, the late Charles Stewart Parnell who observed that most letters answered themselves if you leave them alone long enough. This is profoundly true, although Englishmen do not believe it. I have tried and I know. Americans have either come across Parnell's remark or worked out the same truth for themselves. I applaud their wisdom, but I was once sorry that they practice this form of economy. If we had got an answer to our letter before we sailed, we should have left the coat behind us. As it was, we took the coat with us and carried it about America, giving ourselves indeed a good deal of trouble and reaping very little in the way of comfort or credit by having it. When we did get the letter it showed us that the Americans really do object strongly to these coats and have made a law against them. If we had known that before starting, we should have left the coat behind us at any cost to our feelings.

We are not aggressive people, either of us, and we always try to conform to the customs of the country in which we are, and to respect the feelings of the inhabitants. We cannot, indeed, afford to do anything else. Members of powerful, conquering nations go about the world insisting on having their own way wherever they are. The English, for instance, have spread the practice of drinking tea in the afternoon all over Europe. They make it understood that wherever they go afternoon tea must be obtainable. Other peoples shrug their shoulders and give in. The Americans have insisted that hotels shall be centrally heated and all rooms and passages kept up to a very high temperature. No one else wants this kind of heat, and until the Americans took to traveling in large numbers we were all content with fireplaces in rooms and chilly corridors. But the Americans are a great people, and there is hardly a first-rate hotel left in Europe now which has not got a system of central heating installed. The French have secured the use of their language, or a colorable imitation of their language, on all menu cards and bills of fare. No self-respecting maître d'hotel, even if 90% of his patrons are Americans, English and Germans, would dare to call soup anything except potage or consommé. I think we owe it to the Russians that ladies can now smoke cigarettes without reproach in all European restaurants, though they cannot do this yet in America because very few Russians of the tourist classes go to America. It must be very gratifying to belong to one of these great nations and to be able to import a favorite custom or a valued comfort wherever you go. We are mere Irish. We have never conquered any one ourselves, although we are rather good at winning other people's battles for them. We have not money enough to make it worth anybody's while to consider our tastes; nor, indeed, are we sure enough of ourselves to insist on having our own way. There is always at the backs of our minds the paralyzing thought that perhaps the other people may be right and we may be wrong. We submit rather than struggle.

We like, for instance, good tea at breakfast, strong dark brown tea, which leaves a distinct stain on the inside of the cup out of which we drink it. Nobody else in the world likes this kind of tea. If we were a conquering, domineering people, we should go about Europe and America saying: "This which we drink is tea. Your miserable concoction is slop or worse." If we were rich enough and if large numbers of us traveled, we should establish our kind of tea as an institution. It would be obtainable everywhere. At first it would be called "Thé à l'Irlandaise" and we should get it by asking for it. Afterwards it would be "thé" simply, and if a traveler wanted anything else he would have to ask for that by some special name. But we are not that kind of people. There are not enough of us, and the few there are have not sufficient money to make them worth considering. Besides, we are never self-confident enough to assert that our kind of tea is the true and superior kind. We are uneasily conscious that it is rude to describe other people's favorite beverages as "slop" even when they call ours "poison." And there is always the doubt whether we may not be wrong, after all. Great peoples do not suffer from this doubt. The American is perfectly certain that houses ought to be centrally heated. To him there does not seem to be any possibility of arguing about that. He has discovered a universal truth, and the rest of the world must learn it from him.

The German is equally sure that fresh air in a railway carriage brings death to the person who breathes it. He is as certain about that as he is that water wets him when it is poured over him. There is no room for discussion. But we Irish are differently constituted. When any one tells us that our type of tea reduces those who drink it to the condition of nervous wrecks and ultimately drives them into lunatic asylums, we wonder whether perhaps he may not be right. It is true that we have drunk the stuff for years and felt no bad effects; but there is always "the plaguy hundredth chance" that the bad effects may have been there all the time without our noticing them, and that, though we seem sane, we may be jibbering imbeciles. Thus it is that we never have the heart to make any real struggle for strong tea.

This same infirmity would have prevented our dragging that coat into America if we had found out in time that sealskin coats strike Americans as wicked things. To us it seems plain that seals exist mainly for the purpose of supplying men, and especially women, with skins; just as fathers have their place among created things in order to supply money for the use of their children, or steam in order that it may make engines work. Left to ourselves, we should accept all these as final truths and live in the light of them. But the moment any one assails them with a flat contradiction we begin to doubt. The American says that the seal, at all events the seal that has the luck to live in Hudson Bay, ought not to be deprived of his skin, and that men and women must be content with their own skins, supplemented when necessary by the fleeces of sheep.

The Englishman or the German would stand up to the American.

"I will," one of them would say, "kill a Hudson Bay seal if I like or have him killed for me by some one else. I will wear his skin unless you prevent me by actual force, and I will resist your force as long as I can."

We do not adopt that attitude. We cannot, for the spirit of defiance is not in us. When we were assured, as we were in the end, that the American really has strong feelings about seals, we began to think that he might be right.