In 1833, one Hussey, from Cincinnati, improving upon hints glinting out through agricultural books and poems from the time of the Romans, perfected somewhat a mower and reaper, which, as since bettered by Manny, Ketchum, and McCormick, has made such quick work with our meadows and grain-fields, as to break up all the delicious reveries into which picturesque men in them, and sentimentalists over books representing them, formerly indulged. Gone is the mower’s scythe, now nicked into the quick-sliding saw which eats in a day through acres of grass and golden-bloomed wheat. Gone, Ruth-lessly, the maidens in broad hats, turning with a fork the low-lying clover, and with their eyes the uncut young Timothy, ever near at hand. Vanished from American harvest-fields the whistling grain-gatherers, driven from sight and pictorial illustrations by a single hussy.
During the half-century, too, was set up that useful American music-box, the sewing-machine,—a box that now sings joyful songs of shirts, frills, pantaloons, and vests, in all airs, flights, and stories. In 1846 the application of ether to lure pain into insensibility was first discovered. The honor is contested between three Americans, an honor large enough to be divided up, and a third given to each; but as each naturally covets the exclusive claim, the retort-like monument to perpetuate the discovery must be inscribed, to ether.
At the middle of the century populations had begun to gather into city centres; 515,547 in New York; 340,045 in Philadelphia; 169,054 in Baltimore; 136,881 in Boston; 116,375 in New Orleans; 115,436 in Cincinnati; 77,860 in St. Louis; and in Brooklyn, un-scared by German invasions, 96,838. Chicago, with just a score of years, had more than a score of thousands; but its frequent doublings since have run up so many scores, that the sum leaps the bars of all arithmetics, save its own. Since it has taken to drinking out of Lake Michigan, and begun to draw upon the Atlantic and Liverpool, our calculations have become so dropsical that nothing but tapping can save them.
With greater wealth had come, of course, into America greater variety of aspirations, tastes, modes of display, versatility of social invention and experiment. Most of our leading public men had lived long enough to have as many principles as they could number decades, as many heads as the hydra, as unlike each other as in cheap weeklies, and yet at one period or another a faithful likeness. Good-natured voters, who could recall twenty years of ballot experience, could remember a vote given for and against almost every Whig and Democratic chief. The country had survived the predictions of its downfall, although, at intervals, the New York “Evening Post” for forty-nine years, the “National Intelligencer” for thirty-seven, the “Boston Post” for nineteen, the “New York Herald” for fifteen, and the New York “Daily Tribune” for nine years, had in startling type assured its readers, with most staccato emphasis and adjectives, of its speedy overthrow, if some measure which it reprehended was adopted, or unless some principle which it advocated was not at once received into the national creed.
Plutocracy, of course, also, got larger Josses and re-gilded their shrines with many fantastic patterns. Fashions enlarged and contracted, through the five decades, with every east wind from Paris; and American men, women, and children hastened to change the boots, hats, and vestments, so lovely and so much admired before the last arrival, with the same alarm after the new mode was out, as they would have doffed a garment that had encased a cholera patient.
Fortunate then as now the feather or flower which formed a whole tri-mestral lodgement among the native, or foreign beds of hair, that are so beautifully upholstered one month to be taken down and ridiculed the next.
The Progress of Fashion.
(p. 432)
The stormy petrels of disaster had frequently appeared over the fluctuating sea of our commercial life, covering it in 1837, and in every few successive epochs since, with its screaming, ill-omened, harpy brood, while fleets and single vessels of mercantile adventure broke up and lined the shore with their shattered wrecks. Then as now the owner sometimes turned wrecker of his own cargo, and often made more from the stranded pieces than he would have netted from the entire cargo had it arrived safely in port; as the expected payment of its purchase price would then have reduced the profits. This species of mercantile salvage, by which the proprietor profits by his losses, although not unknown to the traders of Carthage, has had an extension in modern days, that threatens to put merchandizing among those equivocal ventures, which puzzle casuists in cases of conscience, and often defy even the doctrine of chances as to the payment.
The discovery, in 1848, of gold in California bestowed upon America the Midas-touch it had fervently prayed for. Gold, sweated from the pores of labor, was sprinkled in a dusty shower upon the head of beauty, dropped in bars upon the scales of the vendors of dry goods and wet goods, filmed the eyes of marriageable girls with an aureous ophthalmia which indisposed them to see any desirable wedding unless it was golden, and so veneered the duties and chairs of railway directors, members of the legislature and of Congress, with a yellow smearing, that nearly all bills, resolutions, or orders have refused to dip into or drink from any stream but Pactolus. Many homes, however, through that half-century, we are happy to say, unwatered by the curse of that thirsty stream, had taken root and sent up solid shafts whose numerous branches bloomed with bountiful clusters, while sweet-smelling vines, springing alongside the family trees from the roots of the simple love-knots, spread a protecting shade over many a family roof-tree.