Fastness, except in the colors of our cheeks and chintzes and in the movement of our mails, works its curious ways through all manifestations of American civilization. Over a small, old, long-cultivated territory, like most of the European, life moves respectably slow, careful of its savings, gathered up by centuries of work and put out at low rates of interest; across continental stretches like ours, sweeping in wide districts and materials of unbundled, aching plenty, it hastens with panting speed, and can afford to lose everything except time. Our great areas, therefore, make us lively, their vast opportunities, restless, wide-talking, and manifesting the generous coarseness of a large-grained breadth. Out of these alone would come marked characteristics; but when these are further quickened by accelerating activities of discovery in all departments, and by mechanical inventions of vast power in translating man and his products over the earth, the result is rapid brain-work, stimulating action, quick combinations, eruptive and vivacious speech.
M. Varet, a French savan, has ascertained that a fly caught by him in France made three hundred and thirty movements of his wings in a second. This is rapid work; but a Wall Street bull will toss his horns twice as fast.
The larger trains of thought thus started will run of themselves with time-table exactness. We shall only accompany a few special excursion ideas a short distance from the main depot.
An impatient unrest under discipline and restrictions, while kept below fever heat by the wet bandages of a self-imposed law, makes jails double punishments for American criminals, and homes often houses for the detention of juveniles under sixteen. Confinements, except to a small class of our married population, is an abridgment of enterprising work, which, if continued beyond a natural law that prescribes sleep to all and a longer period of inactivity to the special class just named, would be a grievance, calling at least for a convention, addresses, and agitation to get rid of.
The distress of hurry which vexes the vis inertiæ out of our brains, stirs our intellectual pans continually, so that we do not always get the natural cream of ideas. An American is always working for condensed milk processes; to compress a cow into a milk-pot, or utilize all the herds in his neighborhood on his breakfast-table, in a way unheard of elsewhere. Of course this wide-reaching hurry, which grasps large results and scorns the domestic economies, that occupy the thoughts of people elsewhere, refuses to be concerned for any length of time with the importunities of suffering stomachs.
American stomachs have not time enough to wait on nature. Hence doctors’ gigs and apoplectic whirligigs. A patent stomach that should grind grist for a neighborhood or village, and leave the unstomached worker to avail himself of his accelerating opportunities, would command a high price. It would be hired out around the neighborhood, like a threshing-machine or corn-sheller. In fact, American households might in general be advantageously grouped around or framed into one of these mechanical digesters, with attachments for washing out, ironing, and starching their clothes, and for doing up the wasteful processes of visiting, to economic advantages that would tell on the census. One of the disadvantages would be the discouragement of that branch of American industry, now so largely prosperous, of doctors’ bills, chasing in vain after many of the living and at last only overtaking the administrator of the estate, clean out of breath.
Of course, the benefits of associated wealth and skill have not been overlooked as levers to move enterprises, people’s purses, and sometimes those low-down, coarse adjectives, volcanic in their origin, which, in case of dissatisfaction, erupt over the surface. Universal clothes-wringers are the product of this observation. So other combinations have been and are rapidly forming to wring money out of city, State, and Federal exchequers. It is curious to see how the handles of these joint pumping and pocket-exhausting companies all lie towards the great cities.
Most of the business in the United States, north of Washington, is carried on after an express and accelerated fashion, which is impatient of holidays, and rides over the Fourth of July even, as ruthlessly as an express-train over the human obstruction which thus gets forwarded on his journey out of the United States with a despatch almost enviable to the survivors. Even the Federal Constitution prescribes “speedy trials” as a right, and treats a man as injured who does not go it in a capital way, when on that precipitous road, with a final rush.
The common law of the United States presumes that all are minute-men, and know the quick step; while the uncommon law in Wyoming, Idaho, Nevada, and Colorado dispenses with the tedious confinement between the apprehension of the accused and his transporting sentence and uprising. “Delays are dangerous,” is their condensed code.
