He had been through before and knew his man. It may have cost him ten dollars, but Uncle Sam would have wanted three or four hundred; wherefore it is a good thing to know your man when you land at New York with a wife and a two years’ wardrobe.
From this it will be seen that there was none of that turning out of trunks and shameless, heartless exhibition of things that should only be seen in shop windows before they are bought, which one heard so much about a few years ago. That is practically stopped now, and it was stopped by the officials themselves.
They didn’t scatter precious, if unmentionable, garments around the shed floor out of pure devilry or levity of soul. The American official is like any other; he wants to earn his salary as easily as possible, and the new tariff regulations gave him a tremendous lot of work, so he took counsel with himself and came to the astute conclusion that if he systematically outraged the tenderest sentiments of the wives and daughters of millionaires, senators, congressmen, political bosses, and other American sovereigns for a certain period either the regulations would have to be considerably watered down or there would be another civil war.
His conclusions were perfectly correct. The big customs officials faced the music stubbornly for a time; then invitations to dinner and the most select social functions began to fall off. Their wives and daughters lost many opportunities of showing off the pretty frocks which they had smuggled in from Europe.
Election time came near—in other words, Judgment Day for every American official from the Atlantic to the Pacific. It was openly hinted in high places that the authors of such outrages on America’s proudest matrons and most dainty maidens were soulless brutes who weren’t fit to hold office, and then the United States Customs Department came down on its knees, kissed the hems of the garments it had scattered around the shed floor, and, as usual, the Eternal Feminine had conquered.
In Paul Leicester Ford’s delightful word-picture of American political life, “The Honourable Peter Sterling,” the worthy Peter delivers a dinner-table homily on the immorality of five hundred first-class steamboat passengers conspiring to defraud the revenue of their native land by means of false declarations such as most of us signed on the St. Louis.
I was surprised to find that Peter, a shrewd politician and successful ward-boss, knew so little of human nature.
Never from now till the dawn of the millennium abolishes the last Customs House will men and women be convinced that it is immoral or even wrong to smuggle. It is simply a game between the travellers and the officials. If they are caught they pay. If not the man smokes his cigars with an added gusto, and the woman finds a new delight in wearing a dainty costume which all the arts of all the Worths and all the Redferns on earth could never give her—and of such were the voyagers on the St. Louis.[1]
Before I got to bed that night I had come to the conclusion that no country was ever better described in a single phrase than America was by poor G. W. Steevens when he called it the Land of the Dollar.