The comic history of the United States, from a period prior to the discovery of America to times long subsequent to the present

by John D. Sherwood

We take it for granted, then, that all our future Presidents will be the very best and most competent men in the nation, spontaneously acclamated to the office, and not wrung out by industrious party conventions for political ends. Uncommitted to committees or political sponsors, and unweighted by onerous gratitude to ex-working party canvassers, they will naturally hereafter pensively appoint to Cabinet places and diplomatic posts statesmen of pre-eminent ability, patriotism, and integrity, who will as modestly wait to be invited in, as the same class now, when in, stand as if hopelessly deaf, to be distinctly invited out. That they will reluctantly, if at all, subject weak citizens to the pains and penalties of executing and garroting the laws, or the slow and unpractised, to the heavy tasks of carrying the public burdens.

The public debt will naturally disappear. Perhaps some fortunate speculator in petroleum or Erie stock will pay it off, rather than have it in the way, or see it left to bear the market inopportunely. The secret of making money scarce will lead doubtless to the discovery of making it plenty; and then the public debt, being of no use to anybody, will naturally stand aside, as poor relations in times of plenty. Besides, gentlemen being selected, not for their own interests, but for the public good, will, it is to be expected, donate their salaries to a sinking fund, which will carry it off, as some companies do their stockholders’ dividends, to unfathomed bottoms. In fact, if the debt could be cut up into dividends, nothing more would be heard of it. If the whole truth may be safely told, the difficulty in the extinguishment of the debt will not be so much in its undoubted disappearance, as in settling upon that plan among the numbers presented, which will be permitted to hurry it out of sight.

Of course, when the Federal obligations quit, the State and city debts will not have the face to remain behind.

These subjects out of the way, members of Congress, being then gentlemen, as well as educated, capable, and honest men, dragged unwillingly from and not into business, will deal with the few remaining topics with a wise silence,—and this course we take for grant-ed[grant-ed] now; or else will discuss them and not each other, or the encyclopædia of unrelated questions, the publication of which now so enhances the price of paper.

This improvement in our Congressional debates will have a corresponding advantage, also, to those foreigners who, desirous of learning our system, venture upon the speeches made at the Capitol, and, hopelessly misled by the terms employed, and the ferocious adjectives that commit horrible murders on almost every paragraph, confound our geography with that of the Cannibal Islands. We also take it for granted, that our public men will wait for events to justify the crude speculations, which they toss out in conversations with reporters, before cruelly amusing the good-natured public with their vaticinations. Possibly, too, the spread of common schools and Sunday schools, teaching grammar and morality, may lead to the disuse by our print-rushing politicians of styles of speech quite incomprehensible, and of words so raw in outline and so destitute of middle letters as to lead profane people to fancy that they are imitations of their own heedless expressions. Of course, in the better days now dawning, “rings” will only be used to tie quadrupeds to posts, or to restrain vicious bipeds in state prisons. Combinations to do good and increase the general happiness will naturally supplant those curious American circles, whose peripheries are not equidistant from the centre, but which consist in fact only of a centre, and that centre, self.

Happiness, and not wealth, being thus the main pursuit, of course many kinds of occupations, now called business, such as brokers, money-lenders, etc., will cease, and those now engaged in these so-called pursuits—of others, will look after the poor to minister unto them and not to take them in. The superior claims of charity upon the fortunate, who are now living, will naturally be enhanced by the fact that, being at present in the world, they cannot reasonably expect to live much longer than 1970, and may quit much earlier, leaving some selfish heirs not disposed to divide except for an equivalent.

Many judges being released from their present arduous duties of so administering law as to get re-elected—for then no one will value an office so much a sinecure—will have some time, especially in New York, to study law; and some courts of appeal can be repealed. The only injunctions issued will be oral, delivered, not to railroad speculators, but to indiscreet juveniles, unwarily betrayed into their first and last offence. The expense of court-houses being thus partially saved, it is expected, that the small unventilated places in which law is peddled out will be enlarged, and a humane effort be thus made to save the exposed lives of suitors, lawyers, jurors, and judges.

The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals will naturally, with larger means, extend its operations, and embrace employers, suffering from servants of independent ways, from domestics who take six evenings in the week out, and allow their mistress one, and who, for certain discreet considerations, not worth mentioning here, permit those, who divide their estates with them, to occupy a portion of the same house, on condition of not interfering with their separate apartments.

We also take it for granted, that woman’s rights will not be wrongfully urged or withheld; but will be so adjusted, that the public will ascertain what some people would ask for, if they did not become incomprehensible through abundant talking, or what—considering the modesty of the applicants—they really ought to have, although they do not clamor for it in a way that makes some suspect, that men are either to be extinguished outright, or else kept for a few hundred years on probation, until they shall have learned to be respectful, just, and unmanlike.

In this coming good time, men and women are to be equal,—especially the women. If any differences are discovered in any way between them, these differences are to be submitted to conventions chosen by the wisest women, and the differences either to be entirely suppressed, or the dissenters all expelled from the United States. Uniformity is to be secured at all hazards. If necessary, ballot-boxes will be attached to cradles; and women, by any cause confined from active canvassing, will be allowed to vote twice at the next election, in order to bring up their rights to a point where nature left them.