Outside certain Anglo-maniac sets, to be found in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, no one boasts of living on his property.
In England, a man who does nothing goes by the name of gentleman; in Chicago he goes by the name of loafer.
In fifty years' time, when America has two hundred million inhabitants, perhaps she will impose her ideas upon the Old World. Then, maybe, society will have no contempt except for the ignorant and the idle.
A young man, with a very intelligent-looking face, was pointed out to me one evening, in a Chicago drawing-room.
"He is very rich," said my hostess to me softly. "For a year or two after he inherited the property he did no work, and people began to rather shun him. But he has just gone into partnership with a friend in business, and so he is quite reinstated in everyone's esteem."
I know Americans of both sexes who, rather than lead an idle life, have taken to the stage. These actors and actresses belong to good society, which admires them in public and welcomes them in private. Such things do honour to the national spirit, and raise the dramatic profession in the eyes of the public. Why should not all actresses be as respected and respectable as singers or pianists?
Not only is work respectable in America, but in certain States it is compulsory. In the State of Missouri, for instance, any idle improvident fellow who neglects his family or, through shiftless habits, is likely to become a burden to the State, may be sold at auction to the highest bidder for a term of six months. This is a law passed twenty years ago. It provides also, that after the vagrant has worked out the purchase-money, any other sum earned by him, at a fair compensation, is to be applied by his purchaser to the payment of his debts, or the maintenance of his family. If, when he is free again, he returns to his bad habits, his fellow-townsmen take the law into their own hands. They escort him to some public place and flog him; and if that does not cure him, his wife runs the risk of seeing him one fine day hanging from some neighbouring tree. The people will tell you, as the most simple thing in the world, that by acting thus they economise the cost of a police force. Rather primitive this reason, it must be admitted; but in new societies, idleness is a crime, and the bees ought to have a right to drive the drones out of the hive.
Jonathan is but John Bull expanded—John Bull with plenty of elbow-room, and nothing astonishes him, nothing stops him.