[CL] The lowest rate of speed on a railroad can be hardly less than 15 miles an hour, or about three times greater than the ordinary speed of the stage-coaches in France and America. At this rate, a country with railroads, nine times larger than France, would be on the same footing in respect to intercommunication, as France without railroads; supposing a velocity of 25 miles an hour, or five times greater than that of the coaches, the proportion would then stand as one to twentyfive, and a territory four and a half times greater than western Europe, or five times greater than that included within the limits of the 27 States, would be as easily and as promptly administered as France is at present.
[LETTER XXII.]
LABOUR.
Lancaster, (Pennsylvania,) July 20, 1835.
There can be no success without special devotion to some one end; individual or nation, to be successful and prosperous, beware of attempting every thing. Human nature is finite, and, like it, you must set some bounds to your wishes and efforts. Learn how to check yourself and to be content, is the precept of wisdom. If it is a wise rule, then are the Americans, at least partially, wise, for they practise it partially. In general, the American is little disposed to be contented; his idea of equality is to be inferior to none, but he endeavours to rise only in one direction. His only means, and the object of his whole thought, is to subdue the material world, or, in other words, it is industry in its various branches, business, speculation, work, action. To this sole object every thing is made subordinate, education, politics, private and public life. Every thing in American society, from religion and morals to domestic usages and daily habits of life, is bent in the direction of this common aim of each and all. If there are some exceptions to this general rule, they are few, and may be referred to two causes; first, American society, exclusive as it is, is not destined to remain forever imprisoned in this narrow circle, and it already contains the germs of its future condition ages hence, whatever that may be; and secondly, human nature, although bounded, is not exclusive, and no force in the world can stifle its eternal protest against exclusiveness in taste, institutions, and manners. Speculation and business, work and action, these, then, under various forms, make the exclusive object to which the Americans have devoted themselves, with a zeal that amounts to fanaticism; this was marked out for them by the finger of Providence, in order that a continent should be brought under the dominion of civilisation with the least possible delay.
I cannot reflect without sorrow, that at one moment France seem called to take part in this great mission with the two nations, between whom God has placed it, not less morally in regard to character and institutions, than physically in respect to geographical position; namely the English and Spaniards. Whilst Spain, then queen of the world, grasped South America and the vast empire of Mexico, civilised, sword in hand, the native tribes, and built those monumental cities, which will bear witness to its genius and its power, ages after the calumnies of its slanderers shall have been forgotten, whilst England was planting some insignificant colonies on the barren shore of North America, France was exploring the vast basin of the Father of Waters, and taking possession of the St. Lawrence, compared with which our Rhine, tranquille et fier, is but a modest rivulet: we were crowning with fortifications the steep rock of Quebec, building Montreal, founding New Orleans and St. Louis, and here and there subduing the rich plains of Illinois. At that time, we were occupying the most fertile, best watered, and finest portion of North America, the part best suited to become the seat of a magnificent empire, in harmony with our notions of unity. Our engineers, with a sagacity for which the Americans now express the greatest admiration, had marked out by fortresses, the sites most suitable for large towns. Our flag floated over Pittsburg, then Fort Duquesne, Detroit, Chicago, Erie, then Presqu'île, Kingston, then Fort Frontenac, Michillimackinac, Ticonderoga, Vincennes, Fort Charters, Peoria, and St. John, as well as over the capitals of Canada, and Louisiana. Then our language might have set up its claim to be the universal language; the French name bade fair to become the first, not only in the world of ideas, by art and letters, like the Greek; but also in the material and political world, by the number of individuals who would take pride in bearing it, by the immensity of the territory over which its dominion stretched, like the Roman. Louis XIV. in the days of his deification, in the Olympus which he had built himself, meditated this noble destiny for his people and his race. With a lofty pride, he seemed to read their future triumphs on the pages of fate. But there is left to us, who are separated from him only by a single century, there is left, alas! nought but vain and impotent regrets. The English have driven us forever, not only from America, but also from the East Indies, where that great prince had given us a footing. The descendants of our fathers in Canada and Louisiana struggle in vain against the British flood that swallows them up; our language is whelmed in the same deluge; even our names for the cities we founded and the regions we discovered, are corrupted in the harsh throats of our fortunate rivals, and are too Saxonised to be any longer recognised. We have ourselves forgotten, that there was ever a time when we could have claimed to rule the New World; we no longer remember the generous men who devoted themselves, that they might secure the dominion to us. To preserve the name of the heroic La Salle from oblivion, it has become necessary that the American Congress should raise a monument to his memory in the rotunda of the Capital, between those to William Penn and John Smith. We have had no stone for him among all our innumerable sculptures; our painters have covered miles of canvass with their colours, but have not drawn a line in honour of him.
Meanwhile, the gigantic upstarts of Europe defy us, elbow us, and crowd us in. In vain did the genius of the the second Charlemagne restore to us the capital of the first Frank Kaiser, and the finest provinces of Clovis; capital and provinces have been snatched from us almost immediately. One step more downward, and we should have been forever forced back among the secondary states, the worn out and decrepit nations, with no successors to receive and sustain with honor the inheritance of our fathers' glories. What is it that has thus degraded a great people, and robbed it of its well-earned future? In an absolute monarchy like ours, it was enough, that we should be ridden by such a prince as Louis XV., who had inherited nothing from his great ancestor but his vices; it was enough, that during fifty years, France was the plaything of his infamous selfishness, and of the shameful imbecility of his creatures. Absolute governments may sometimes produce wonders in a short space of time, but they are exposed to cruel reverses. Had we been the conquerors in America, instead of having been conquered by the English, what would have been the consequences? To judge what the people of New France would have been, by what the Canadians and the Creoles of Louisiana are, the boldness and rapidity of the progress of civilisation would have been much less than it has been. When it is proposed to conquer nations on the field of battle, France may enter the lists with confidence; but when it is proposed to subdue nature, the Englishman is our superior. He has firmer sinews and more vigourous muscle; physically he is better made for labour; he carries it on with more perseverance and method; he becomes interested in it, and obstinately bent upon it. If he meets any obstacle in his task, he attacks it with the devouring passion which a Frenchman can feel only in the presence of an adversary in a human form.
With what zeal and devotion has the Anglo-American fulfilled his mission as a pioneer in a new continent! Behold how he makes his way over the rocks and precipices; see how he struggles in close fight with the rivers, with the swamps, with the primeval forests; see how he slaughters the wolf and the bear, how he exterminates the Indian, who in his eyes is only another wild beast! In this conflict with the external world, with the land and the waters, with mountains and pestilential marshes, he appears full of that impetuosity with which Greece flung itself into Asia at the voice of Alexander; of that fanatical daring with which Mahomet inspired his Arabs for the conquest of the Eastern Empire; of that delirious courage which animated our fathers forty years ago, when they threw themselves upon Europe. On the same rivers, therefore, on which our colonists floated, carelessly singing, in the bark canoe of the savage, they have launched fleets of superb steamers. Where we fraternised with the Red Skins, sleeping with them in the forests, living like them on the chase, travelling, in their manner, through rugged trails afoot, the persevering American has felled the aged trees, guided the plough, inclosed the fields, substituted the best breeds of English cattle for the wild deer, created farms, flourishing villages, and opulent cities, dug canals, and made roads. Those waterfalls which we admired as lovers of the picturesque, and the height of which our officers measured at the risk of their lives, he has shut up for the use of his mills and factories, regardless of the scenery. If these countries had continued to belong to the French, the population would certainly have been more gay than the present American race; it would have enjoyed more highly, whatever it should have possessed, but it would have had less of comfort and wealth, and ages would have passed away, before man had become master of those regions, which have been reclaimed in less than fifty years by the Americans.
If we examine the acts passed by the local legislatures at each session, we shall find that at least three-fourths relate to the banks, which give credit to the working men; to the establishment of new religious societies and churches, which are the citadels where the guardians of industry keep watch; to routes and means of communication, roads, canals, railways, bridges, and steamboats, which facilitate the access of the producer to the markets; to primary instruction for the use of the mechanic and the labourer; to various commercial regulations; or to the incorporation of towns and villages, the work of these hardy pioneers. There is no mention of an army; the fine arts are not so much as named; literary institutions and the higher scientific studies are rarely honoured with notice. The tendency of the laws is above all to promote industry, material labour, the task of the moment. In the older States, they always profess the greatest respect for property, because the legislature feels that the greatest encouragement to industry is to respect its fruits. They are especially conservative of landed property, either from a lingering remembrance of the feudal laws of the mother country, or because they are anxious to preserve some element of stability in the midst of the general change; yet the laws generally pay less regard to the rights of property than is the case in Europe. Wo to whatever is inactive and unproductive, if it can be accused, on however slight a foundation, of resting upon monopoly and privilege! The rights of industry here have the precedence of all others, efface all others, and it is on this account, that, except in in the affair of public credit, in which the towns and States pique themselves on the most scrupulous exactness in fulfilling their engagements, in every dispute between the capitalists and the producer, the latter has almost always the better.
Every thing is here arranged to facilitate industry; the towns are built on the English plan; men of business, instead of being scattered over the town, occupy a particular quarter, which is devoted exclusively to them, in which there is not a building used as a dwelling-house, and nothing but offices and warehouses are to be seen. The brokers, bankers, and lawyers here have their cells, the merchants their counting-rooms; here the banks, insurance offices, and other companies, have their chambers, and other buildings are filled from cellar to garret with articles of merchandise. At any hour, one merchant has but a few steps to go after any other, after a broker or a lawyer. This, it will be seen, is not according to the Paris fashion, by which a great deal of precious time is lost by men of business in running after one another; in this respect, Paris is the worst arranged commercial city in the world. New York is, however inferior in this particular to London or Liverpool; it has nothing like the great docks and the Commercial House.