Beyond this, I have “interviewed” politicians of every school and temper—from Fernando Wood, the chief “wire puller” of swindling Tammany Hall, up to doughty, tongue-tied General Grant, the “useless slaughtering” commander of the northern forces during the civil war—having had the pleasure of learning from the former how “logs” are “rolled” in the furtherance of party ends; and, from the latter, although the information only came out in dribbled monosyllables in answer to gently disguised questions, for the reticent warrior can hardly put two words of a sentence together, that he had been “bred up a farmer,” and, considered himself “more fit” for “that state of life” than any other—in which opinion, as he has never been publicly tried in the calling, I cordially agree with him.
I have, likewise, “interviewed” prize-fighters, before they proceeded to take action in some “merry little mill;” Mormon prophets’ wives, who had come east to purchase Parisian finery for the after delectation of Utah eyes, and the envy of other polygamous families not so favoured as they; Chinese missions, under the escort of a Burlinghame; condemned criminals, awaiting the fatal noose, and who wished to give their “last speech and confession” to the world; Japanese jugglers, who expressed their opinion of the States—the main object of every reporter’s cross-examination generally—in a sort of phonographic language, too, in which the signs were feats of legerdemain and the “arbitrary characters,” the butterfly and basket tricks!
In fact, I “interviewed” everybody that was worth “interviewing,” and who could be got at to be “interviewed.”
Seen life?
I should just think I had. I would not dream of fancying myself in a position to give any trustworthy opinion on the subject of America and its people, unless I had thus mixed amongst all classes of the community during a lengthened stay in the country—although, mind you, your “working-man’s friend,” and “trades’ union delegate,” and “Alliance” teetotaller, and “liberal” peer, and disestablishing Nonconformist—tourists all of only three weeks’ experience—think they can take in, in one glance, the whole extent of a continent embracing some hundred million square miles, understanding the entire working of the “institutions,” of the “great republic” through travelling on a railroad from New York to Chicago!
As you will have noticed, reporters over there are set to very varied work instead of being fixed in any one especial groove as in England.
On the paper, for instance, to which I was attached, all the staff used, regularly in turn, to do the dramatic criticism at the various theatres. We, also, had to report the sermons at all the many churches of various religious denominations on Sunday—whether they were Methodist, Episcopalian, Baptist, Lutheran, Roman Catholic, Unitarian, Universalist, or other which would tire you to even hear named; not omitting the “Spiritualists,” “Agapemonites,” and the “Peculiar People”—so, as was pointed out in an opposition paper at the time, we “took the devil and the deity on week days and Sundays alternately!”
On the whole, putting the higher class of Americans on one side—I refer to those who mostly belong to the older families, in some instances tracing back their descent to the days of the Puritan Fathers, and who, having learnt culture and refinement abroad, rarely mix in public life in the States—the general faith and morality of our Yankee “cousins” have never been so tersely described as in the “Pious Editor’s Creed” of the Biglow Papers, which were written, as you are doubtless aware, by an American, too:—
“I du believe in special ways
O’ prayin’ an’ convartin’;
The bread comes back in many days,
An’ buttered, tu, for sartin;
I mean in preyin’ till one busts
On wut the party chooses,
An’ in convartin’ public trusts
To very privit uses!”
In one speciality, the New York journals, otherwise so inferior, set an example which might be imitated to advantage by their London contemporaries;—and, that is, in their news, the back-bone of an ostensible “news”-paper.