From the Atlantic to the Pacific, and from Maine to Mexico, you simply can’t get away from it. In other countries people talk about money,—generally and incidentally about pounds, or francs, or marks, or pesetas,—but in America it is dollars first, last, and all the time.
Where an Englishman would say a man was keen on making money, an American would say “he’s out for dollars.” On this side we speak of making a fortune, over there it’s “making a pile,”—of dollars understood,—and so on.
But there is another sense in which the pungent phrase is true. I am not going to commit myself to the assertion that everything in the States is a dollar, because there are many things which cost more than a dollar. There are also some—a few—which cost less, such as newspapers and tramcar tickets, but, as a rule, when you put your hand into your pocket a dollar comes out—often several—and you don’t have much change.
Thus, when I had released my baggage from the lax grip of the United States Customs, I took a carriage ticket at the desk. Three dollars. In London the fare from the station to the hotel would have been about half a crown. The gentleman who put my luggage up received a quarter. If I had offered him less he would probably have declined it and asked me, with scathing irony, to come and have a drink at his expense.
Still, that carriage was a carriage, and not a cab; well-hung, well-cushioned, and well-horsed. In fact, I was not many hours in New York before I began to see that, although you pay, you get. Everything from a banquet to a boot-shine is done in better style than it is in England.
“We are very full, sir,” said the clerk at the Murray Hill Hotel; “but I can give you a four-dollar room. I daresay you’ll like a comfortable night after your passage.”
I thought sixteen shillings and eightpence a good deal for a room, but I found that the room was really a suite, a big bed-sitting-room, beautifully furnished, with bathroom, lavatory, and clothes-cupboard attached.
The next morning I had a shine which cost fivepence, but that shine lasted all the way to San Francisco. The boots simply needed dusting and they were as bright as ever. Then I went and had a shilling shave, and found that the American shave is to the English one as a Turkish bath is to a cold tub; and so on throughout. You spend more money, far more, than in England, but you get a great deal more for it. But to this rule there is one great and glorious exception, and that is railway travelling.
I presented my ordinary first-class tickets at the booking-office in the Central Depôt, and then came from the lips of the keen-faced, but most polite and obliging clerk, the inevitable “five dollars please—and if you’re going on the South-Western Limited it will be one dollar more. You see this is one of the fastest trains in the world, and we keep it select. You’ll have a section to yourself all the way.”
I checked my trunk in the baggage-office and said a thankful good-bye to it for three thousand two hundred miles, after buying a new strap for it, which, curiously enough, was not a dollar, but seventy-five cents. Then I took possession of my cosy corner in the long, luxuriously furnished car to be whirled over a thousand miles of iron road in twenty-three hours and a half.