It is certainly strange that useful customs and devices do not spread from country to country with more facility and promptness than they do. You step across the German border almost anywhere, and suddenly the German stove has disappeared. In Italy you find a foolish and ineffectual modification of it, in Paris you find an unprepossessing “adaptation” of our base-burner on a reduced pattern.
Fifteen years ago Paris had a cheap and cunning little fire kindler consisting of a pine shaving, curled as it came from the carpenter’s plane, and gummed over with an inflammable substance which would burn several minutes and set fire to the most obdurate wood. It was cheap and handy, but no stranger carried the idea home with him. Paris has another swift and victorious kindler, now, in the form of a small black cake made of I don’t know what; but you shove it under the wood and touch a match to it and your fire is made. No one will think to carry that device to America, or elsewhere. In America we prefer to kindle the fire with the kerosene can and chance the inquest. I have been in a multitude of places where pine cones were abundant, but only in the French Riviera and in one place in Italy have I seen them in the wood box to kindle the fires with.
For perfect adaptation to the service required, look at the American gum shoe and the American arctic. Their virtues ought to have carried them to all wet and snowy lands; but they haven’t done anything of the kind. There are few places on the continent of Europe where one can buy them.
And observe how slowly our typewriting machine makes its way. In the great city of Florence I was able to find only one place where I could get typewriting done; and then it was not done by a native, but by an American girl. In the great city of Munich I found one typewriting establishment, but the operator was sick and that suspended the business. I was told that there was no opposition house. In the prodigious city of Berlin I was not able to find a typewriter at all. There was not even one in our Embassy or its branches. Our representative there sent to London for the best one to be had in that capital, and got an incapable, who would have been tarred and feathered in Mud Springs, Arizona. Four years ago a typewritten page was a seldom sight in Europe, and when you saw it it made you heartsick, it was so inartistic, and so blurred and shabby and slovenly. It was because the Europeans made the machines themselves, and the making of nice machinery is not one of their gifts. England imports ours, now. This is wise; she will have her reward.
In all these years the American fountain pen has hardly got a start in Europe. There is no market for it. It is too handy, too inspiring, too capable, too much of a time saver. The dismal steel pen and the compass-jawed quill are preferred. And semi-liquid mud is preferred to ink, apparently, everywhere in Europe. This in face of the fact that there is ink to be had in America--and at club rates, too.
Then there is the elevator, lift, ascenseur. America has had the benefit of this invaluable contrivance for a generation and a half, and it is now used in all our cities and villages, in all hotels, in all lofty business buildings and factories, and in many private dwellings. But we can’t spread it, we can’t beguile Europe with it. In Europe an elevator is even to this day a rarity and a curiosity. Especially a curiosity. As a rule it seats but three or four persons--often only two--and it travels so slowly and cautiously and timorously and piously and solemnly that it makes a person feel creepy and crawly and scary and dismal and repentant. Anybody with sound legs can give the continental elevator two flights the start and beat it to the sixth floor. Every time these nations merely import an American idea, instead of importing the concreted thing itself, the result is a failure. They tried to make the sewing machine, and couldn’t; they are trying to make fountain pens and typewriters and can’t; they are making these dreary elevators, now--and patenting them! Satire can no further go.
I think that as a rule we develop a borrowed European idea forward, and that Europe develops a borrowed American idea backward. We borrowed gas lighting and the railroad from England, and the arc light from France, and these things have improved under our culture. We have lent Europe our tramway, telegraph, sewing machine, phonograph, telephone, and kodak, and while we may not claim that in these particular instances she has developed them backward, we are justified in claiming that she has added no notable improvements to them. We have added the improvements ourselves and she has accepted them. Why she has not accepted and universally adopted the improved elevator is a surprising and puzzling thing. Its rightful place is among the great ideas of our great age. It is an epoch maker. It is a concentrator of population, and economizer of room. It is going to build our cities skyward instead of out toward the horizons.[[6]] It is going to enable five millions of people to live comfortably on the same ground space that one million uncomfortably lives on now. It is going to make cheap quarters for Tom, Dick, and Harry near their work, in place of three miles from it, as is the rule to-day. It is going to save them the necessity of adding a six-flight climb to the already sufficient fatigue of their day’s labor.
We imitate some of the good things which we find in Europe, and we ought to imitate more of them. At the same time Europe ought to imitate us somewhat more than she does. The crusty, ill-mannered and in every way detestable Parisian cabman ought to imitate our courteous and friendly Boston cabman--and stop there. He can’t learn anything from the guild in New York. And it would morally help the Parisian shopkeeper if he would imitate the fair dealing of his American cousin. With us it is not necessary to ask the price of small articles before we buy them, but in Paris the person who fails to take that precaution will get scorched. In business we are prompt, fair, and trustworthy in all our small trade matters. It is the rule. In the friendliest spirit I would recommend France to imitate these humble virtues. Particularly in the kodak business. Pray get no kodak pictures developed in France--and especially in Nice. They will send you your bill to Rome or Jericho, or whithersoever you have gone, but that is all you will get. You will never see your negatives again, or the developed pictures, either. And by and by the head house in Paris will demand payment once more, and constructively threaten you with “proceedings.” If you inquire if they mailed your package across the frontier without registering it, they are coldly silent. If you inquire how they expected to trace and recover a lost package without a post-office receipt, they are dumb again. A little intelligence inserted into the kodak business in those regions would be helpful, if it could be done without shock.
But the worst of all is, that Europe cannot be persuaded to imitate our railway methods. Two or three years ago I liked the European methods, but experience has dislodged that superstition. All over the Continent the system--to call it by an extravagant term--is sufficiently poor and slow and clumsy, or unintelligent; but in these regards Italy and France are entitled to the chromo. In Italy it takes more than half an hour to buy a through ticket to Paris at Cook & Sons’ offices, there is such a formidable amount of red tape and recording connected with the vast transaction. Every little detail of the matter must be written down in a set of books--your name, condition, nationality, religion, date, hour, number of the train, and all that; and at last you get your ticket and think you are done, but you are not; it must be carried to the station and stamped; and even that is not the end, for if you stop over at any point it must be stamped again or it is forfeited. And yet you save time and trouble by going to Cook instead of to the station. Buying your ticket does not finish your job. Your trunks must be weighed, and paid for at about human-being rates. This takes another quarter of an hour of your time--perhaps half an hour if you are at the tail of the procession. You get paper checks, which are twice as easy to lose as brass ones. You cannot secure a seat beforehand, but must take your chances with the general rush to the train. If you have your family with you, you may have to distribute them among several cars. There is one annoying feature which is common all over the Continent, and that is, that if you want to make a short journey you cannot buy your ticket whenever you find the ticket office open, but must wait until it is doing business for your particular train; and that only begins, as a rule, a quarter of an hour before the train’s time of starting. The cars are most ingeniously inconvenient, cramped, and uncomfortable, and in Italy they are phenomenally dirty. The European “system” was devised either by a maniac or by a person whose idea was to hamper, bother, and exasperate the traveler in all conceivable ways and sedulously and painstakingly discourage custom. In Italy, as far as my experience goes, it is the custom to use the sleeping cars on the day trains and take them off when the sun goes down. One thing is sure, anyway: if that is not the case, it will be, presently, when they think of it. They can be depended upon to snap up as darling an idea as that with joy.
No, we are bad enough about not importing valuable European ideas, but Europe is still slower about introducing ours. Europe has always--from away back--been neglectful in this regard. Take our admirable postal and express system, for instance. We had it perfectly developed and running smoothly and beautifully more than three hundred years ago; and Europe came over and admired it and eloquently praised it--but didn’t adopt it. We Americans.... But let Prescott tell about it. I quote from the Conquest of Peru, chapter 2, vol. 1: