The little French provincial shopkeeper, who locks his shop-door, from twelve to one o'clock, while he dines with his family, has come nearer than you to solving the problem of life, How to be happy. Sharper and Co. may suspend payment, without the fact interfering with his digestion. Twice a year he goes and takes up his three per cent. dividend on the Government Stock. It is petty, perhaps; but it is secure, and he can sleep upon both ears.
Those Americans are never still, never at rest. Even when they are sitting they must be on the move; witness the rocking-chair habit.
No repose for them: their life is perpetual motion, a frantic race.
Opposite my windows, at the Richelieu Hotel in Chicago, there was a railway station. Every ten minutes the local trains came and went. Each time the bell announced the approach of a train, I saw a crowd tear along the path of the station, and leap into the carriages, taking them by storm. By leaving their offices thirty seconds earlier, these good people might have walked comfortably to the station and saved themselves this breathless chase.
Go to the Brooklyn Bridge station, New York, about five o'clock in the afternoon. There you will see a sight very like the storming of a fort.
An American wrote me one day a note of a few lines, and thus excused himself for his brevity: "A word in haste—I have hardly time to wink." Poor fellow! only think of it, not even time to wink; it makes one giddy.
But it must be acknowledged that this feverish activity has made America what she is. Yesterday forest and swamp, to-day towns of five, ten thousand souls, with churches, free libraries, free schools, newspapers; towns where people work, think, read, pray, make fortunes, go bankrupt, etc.
Very few Americans are content to live on their private means. There is no leisure class, there are no unemployed. Rich and poor, old and young, all work. They die in harness, harnessed to the car of Mammon. A millionaire on his death-bed says to his son: "I leave you my fortune on the express condition that you work." General Daniel Butterfield expressed the feeling of most American fathers when he said on some public occasion: "If I had ten sons I would not give them a cent until they had learned to earn their own living, though I were ten times a millionaire."
Mr. Whitelaw Reid, editor of the New York Tribune, Mr. Madill, of the Chicago Tribune, and several other editors I could mention, are millionaires. You will invariably find them at their desks until one in the morning. They work like simple supernumeraries.