Members of Congress in A. D. 1900.
(p. 520)
The law of dower, as practically enforced, is shaped by the same rapidly revolving lathe, which makes so much of our domestic hollow-ware. The wife spends the principal before her husband’s death, and thus shuns the tedious complications of legal proceedings, which admeasures the dower often to the enterpising lawyer, the bailiffs, and the court clerks.
A marked improvement has also been made in the distribution of estates generally. Among the slow nations of Europe the children generally wait for the unfortunate old people to die before taking their property. This tardy habit is now found to be often productive of great injury to children, especially to those who, snatched away by rapid manners before their begettors, are thus defrauded of their shares. “A bird in the hand” is no longer a rara avis, but a domestic fowl cultivated by rapid feeding. Gifts to the living avoid the taxes and discomforts of probate courts, in which it is disagreeable for a family, covered with crape, to sit and see a politician assess the estate upon the heirs.
Fast progress has been made, also, in preventive justice. Injunctions, behind whose shields such old fogies as Lord Eldon, Lord Somers, Lord Thurlow, John Marshall, or William Story were accustomed to hide threatened rights until the danger was over-past, have recently been turned edgewise, and cut down corporations and others obnoxious Fisc-ally or otherwise, or else pressed against them so that they perspired away their adipose stock until they were comfortably ready for a receiver.
The doctrine of divorce, which has puzzled the learned John Miltons in all the sleepy ages that have dozed before us, has been, in many States, simplified, so that he who runs through them may read a decree. Some people have uncharitably supposed that the premiums offered to individual disunions by such States as Illinois and Indiana, were devices to draw speculators thither for a day or so; but these are vagrant suspicions that ought not to be allowed on our trains.
In feudal countries, where purity of blood is carefully guarded,—inasmuch as the descents to property are the rule and not descents from it as in America,—legists declare that a woman may not marry her cousin, her uncle, her grandfather, or even her father,—a wise enough restriction, perhaps, for such benighted folks, and where care in marrying often leaves the female part of the household to the dangerous company of these relations until far on in life. But with us women are not shut up to any such necessities, except in Utah, where they may, in the course of a respectably long life, marry through every genealogical degree without knowing it. In other parts they are as necessary as insurance companies, and so marry very soon; so that silver weddings are often seen at an early age, while golden matrimonies are more frequent than maternities or patrimonies. To every thoughtful man, who moves about our rapidly dissolving surfaces, where the railroad car is the kaleidoscope which turns up the bits of humanity in new combinations, a wife is necessary to put up a monument over him; for moving on is such a fixed law,—the only fixed thing in America, except debt and live corruption,—that while he was turning his majority, all his family relations would have gone to other States.
The two curiosities in the United States are fat people and servants. Both run away in a velocipedal hurry; the former into sharp bargains, and the latter into independent powers which dictate treaties and make alliances like other self-governing communities. An American family is like a South Carolina regiment, all officers and no privates; a boarding-house, a Swiss confederacy, in which the cantons, wedged into neutralizing elements, get forward like a stool braced every-way and equipoised into an aching discomfort; and a hotel, like twenty German Bunds entangled by contrarious independent interests that knot themselves into teasing discontents, and fret into jars which hold a variety of unpreserved, acidulating fruits. The freest joke in all America is one of its large hotels, which fancies Axminster carpets and chandeliers in a large parlor, and numerous discomforts packed in ever-dwindling rooms, to be happiness. But then the “gentlemanly proprietor” makes up for all this in the bills, which convince all the guests, that they must have enjoyed themselves and at an American rate of speed.
Trade has also had its great advances, not only in the figures which stand in merchants’ magazines like pyramids, with bases always widening downwards, but in the dwindling measures, quarts, gallons, pecks, and bushels, and the waning qualities which sharpen upwards to steady apexes. How to make up in the bill what is taken from the body is a critical study, in which most tradesmen have, without any prizes offered by outsiders, become great proficients. If that man is a public benefactor who makes two blades grow in the place of one, surely he may be rewarded with a passing notice, who takes all the steel out of the one sent to him for repairs, and then divides up the instrument into several blades. Making water into wine, chalk into milk, chemicals into as many varieties of drinkables as there are days of the year, and diluting articles deemed too strong when left to their raw native vigor, so as to adapt them to our weakened constitutions, attest the beneficent designs of manufacturers and merchants upon Americans of plethoric habits. Peabodies shelling out to poorbodies furnish examples of abundant charity not so widely touching as these.
To make a small measure go twice as far as a large one is more than a feat; it approaches creation. What may in time be considered a double bed, it is impossible yet to foresee; but certain it is, that while single beds are increasing to an alarmingly wide extent, their narrowness is becoming such as to require a new definition of a line to avoid disagreeable collisions.
Mercantile failures, elsewhere hurtful, are with us hurried on into vivacious benefits, dividing up, before the expiration of the credits given, the accumulated profits which otherwise might accumulate in stagnating dulness in the firm. A steady increase of wages is solving, too, those perplexing theories how to balance capital and labor; a weekly distribution of earnings keeping down injudicious balances in the bank.