Gleanings in Europe

by James Fenimore Cooper

England is the country of the wealthy. So far as the mass can derive benefits from the compulsory regulations of their superiors (and positive benefits, beyond question, are as much obtained in this manner, as fleets and armies and prisons are made more comfortable to their personnels by discipline) it may expect them, but when the interests of the two clash, the weak are obliged to succumb.

The celebrated division of labour, that has so much contributed to the aggrandizement of England, extends to the domestic establishments. Men are assorted for service, as in armies; size and appearance being quite as much, and in many cases more, consulted, than character. Five feet ten and upwards, barring extraordinary exceptions, make a footman’s fortune. These are engaged in the great houses; those that are smaller squeeze in where they can, or get into less pretending mansions. All the little fellows sink into pot-boys, grooms, stable-men, and attendants at the inns. The English footman I have engaged, is a steady little old man, with a red face and powdered poll, who appears in black breeches and coat, but who says himself that his size has marred his fortune. He can just see over my shoulder, as I sit at table. If my watch were as regular, as this fellow, I should have less cause to complain of it. He is never out of the way, speaks just loud enough to be heard, and calls me master. The rogue has had passages in his life, too, for he once lived with Peter Pindar, and accompanied Opie in his first journey to London. He is cockney born, is about fifty, and has run his career between Temple Bar and Covent Garden. I found him at the hotel, and this is his first appearance among the quality, whose splendour acts forcibly on his imagination. W—— caught him in a perfect ecstacy the other day, reading the card of an Earl, which had just been given him at the door. He is much contemned, I find, in the houses where I visit, on account of his dwarfish stature, for he is obliged to accompany me, occasionally.

It is a curious study to enter into the house, as well as the human, details of this capital. As caprice has often as much to do with the decisions of the luxurious as judgment, a pretty face is quite as likely to be a recommendation to a maid, as is stature to a footman. The consequence is, that Westminster, in the season, presents as fine a collection of men and women, as the earth ever held within the same space. The upper classes of the English are, as a whole, a fine race of people, and, as they lay so much stress on the appearance of their dependents, it is not usual to see one of diminutive stature, or ungainly exterior, near their dwellings. The guards, the regiments principally kept about London, are picked men, so that there is a concentration of fine forms of both sexes to be met with in the streets. The dwarfs congregate about the stables, or mews as they are called here, and, now and then, one is seen skulking along with a pot of beer in his hand. But in the streets, about the equipages, or at the doors of the houses, surprisingly few but the well looking of both sexes are seen.

As strangers commonly reside in this part of the town, they are frequently misled by these facts, in making up their opinions of the relative stature of the English and other nations. I feel persuaded that the men of England, as a whole, are essentially below the stature of the men of America. They are of fuller habit, a consequence of climate, in a certain degree, but chiefly, I believe, from knowing how and what to eat; but the average of their frames, could the fact be come at, I feel persuaded would fall below our own. Not so with the women. England appears to have two very distinct races of both men and women; the tall and the short. The short are short indeed, and they are much more numerous than a casual observer would be apt to imagine. Nothing of the sort exists with us. I do not mean that we have no small men, but they are not seen in troops as they are seen here. I have frequently met with clusters of these little fellows in London, not one of whom was more than five feet, or five feet one or two inches high. In the drawing-room, and in public places frequented by the upper classes, I find myself a medium-sized man, whereas, on the continent, I was much above that mark.

In America it is unusual to meet with a woman of any class, who approaches the ordinary stature of the men. Nothing is more common in England, especially in the upper circles. I have frequently seen men, and reasonably tall men too, walking with their wives, between whose statures there was no perceptible difference. Now such a thing is very rare with us, but very common here; so common, I think, as to remove the suspicion that the eye may be seeking exceptions, in the greater throngs of a condensed population, a circumstance against which it is very necessary to guard, in making comparisons as between England and America.

It is a received notion that fewer old people, in proportion to whole numbers, are seen in America, than are seen here. The fact must be so, since it could not well be otherwise. This is a case in point, by which to demonstrate the little value of the common-place observations of travellers. Even more pretending statisticians frequently fall into grave blunders of this sort, for the tastes necessary to laboured and critical examinations of facts, are seldom found united with the readiness of thought, and fertility of invention, that are needed in a successful examination of new principles, or of old principles environed by novel circumstances. No one but an original thinker can ever write well, or very usefully of America, since the world has never before furnished an example of a people who have been placed under circumstances so peculiarly their own, both political and social. Let us apply our reasoning.

To be eighty years old one must have been born eighty years ago. Now eighty years ago, the entire population of America may have been about three millions, while that of England was more than seven. A simple proposition in arithmetic would prove to us, that with such premises, one ought to see more than twice as many people eighty years old in England, than in America; for as three are to seven, so are seven to sixteen and one-third. Setting aside the qualifying circumstances, of which there are some, here is arithmetical demonstration, that for every seven people who are eighty years old in America, one ought to meet in England with sixteen and one-third, in order to equalize the chances of life in the two countries. The qualifying circumstances are the influence of immigration, which, until quite lately, has not amounted to much, and which perhaps would equal the allowance I have already made in my premises, as England had actually nearer eight than seven millions of souls, eighty years since: and the effect of surface. I say the effect of surface, for a mere observer, who should travel over a portion of America equal in extent to all England, would pass through a country that, eighty years ago, had not probably a population of half a million, and this allowing him, too, to travel through its most peopled part.

The comparative statistical views of Europe and America, that have been published in this hemisphere, are almost all obnoxious to objections of this character, the writers being unable to appreciate the influence of facts of which they have no knowledge, and which are too novel to suggest themselves to men trained in other habits of thinking.

I see no reason to believe that human life is not as long in our part of America, as it is here, and, on the whole, I am inclined to believe that the average of years is in our favour. I do not intend to say that the mean years of running lives is as high with us, as it is here, for we know that they are not. The number of children, and the facts I have just stated, forbid it. But I believe the child born in the state of New York, cæteris paribus, has as good a chance of attaining the age of ninety, so far as climate is concerned, as the child born in Kent, or Essex, or Oxford, and so far as other circumstances are concerned, perhaps a better. The freshness of the English complexion is apt to deceive inconsiderate observers. This, I take it, is merely the effect of fog and sea-air, and, except in very low latitudes, where the heat of the sun deadens the skin, as it might be to protect the system against its own rays, is to be seen every where, under the same circumstances. There is something in the exhalations of a country newly cleared, beyond a question, unfavourable to health, and this the more so, in latitudes as low as our own; but I now speak of the older parts of the country, where time has already removed this objection. I can remember when it was not usual to see a woman with a good colour, in the mountains around C——n, while it is now unusual to find girls with a finer bloom than those of the present generation. At my residence at Angevine in West-Chester, a few years since, I could count ten people more than ninety years old, within ten miles of my own door. One of them had actually lived as a servant in the family of Col. Heathcote, of whom you know something, and who figured in the colony, at the close of the seventeenth century; and another was Mr. Augustus Van Cortlandt, a gentleman who drove his own blooded horses, at the ripe years of four score and ten. The old servant actually laboured for my oldest child, making five generations of the same family, in whose service she had toiled.

The notion of the comparative insalubrity of our climate, however, is not quite general, for, making a call, the other day, on Lady Affleck, a New York woman well advanced in life, she expressed her conviction that people lived to a greater age in America, than in England! She had been making inquiries after the members of the old colonial gentry, such as Mrs. White,[5] John Jay, Mr. John de Lancey, Mrs. Izard, Mr. Van Cortlandt, Mr. John Watts, Lady Mary Watts, and divers others, most of whom were octogenarians, and several of whom were drawing near to a century. It appeared to me that the good old lady wished herself back among them, to get a mouthful of native air.