The manners and customs are altogether those of a working, busy society. At the age of fifteen years, a man is engaged in business; at twenty-one he is established, he has his farm, his workshop, his counting-room, or his office, in a word his employment, whatever it may be. He now also takes a wife, and at twentytwo is the father of a family, and consequently has a powerful stimulus to excite him to industry. A man who has no profession, and, which is nearly the same thing, who is not married, enjoys little consideration; he, who is an active and useful member of society, who contributes his share to augment the national wealth and increase the numbers of the population, he only is looked upon with respect and favour. The American is educated with the idea that he will have some particular occupation, that he is to be a farmer, artisan, manufacturer, merchant, speculator, lawyer, physician, or minister, perhaps all in succession, and that, if he is active and intelligent, he will make his fortune. He has no conception of living without a profession, even when his family is rich, for he sees nobody about him, not engaged in business. The man of leisure is a variety of the human species, of which the Yankee does not suspect the existence, and he knows that if rich to-day, his father may be ruined tomorrow. Besides the father himself is engaged in business, according to custom, and does not think of dispossessing himself of his fortune; if the son wishes to have one at present, let him make it himself!
The habits of life are those of an exclusively working people. From the moment he gets up, the American is at his work, and he is engaged in it till the hour of sleep. Pleasure is never permitted to interrupt his business; public affairs only have the right to occupy a few moments. Even meal-time is not for him a period of relaxation, in which his wearied mind seeks repose in the bosom of his friends; it is only a disagreeable interruption of business, an interruption to which he yields because it cannot be avoided, but which he abridges as much as possible. In the evening, if no political meeting requires his attendance, if he does not go to discuss some question of public interest, or to a religious meeting, he sits at home, thoughtful and absorbed in his meditations, whether on the transactions of the day or the projects of the morrow. He refrains from business on Sunday, because his religion commands it, but it also requires him to abstain from all amusement and recreation, music, cards, dice, or billiards, under penalty of sacrilege. On Sunday an American would not venture to receive his friends; his servants would not consent to it, and he can hardly secure their services for himself, at their own hour, on that day. A few days since, the mayor of New York was accused by one of the newspapers of having entertained on Sunday some English noblemen, who came out in their own yacht to give the American democracy a strange idea of British tastes. The mayor hastened to declare publicly, that he was too well acquainted with his duties as a Christian to entertain his friends on the Sabbath. Nothing is therefore, more melancholy than the seventh day in this country; after such a Sunday, the labour of Monday is a delightful pastime.
Approach an English merchant in his counting-room in the morning, and you will find him stiff and dry, answering you only by monosyllables; accost him at the hour of closing the mails, he will be at no pains to conceal his impatience; he will dismiss you without always taking care to do it politely. The same man, in his drawing-room in the evening, or at his country-house in summer, will be full of courtesy and attention towards you. The Englishman divides his time, and does but one thing at once; in the morning he is wholly absorbed in business; in the evening he plays the man of leisure, reposing and enjoying life; he is a gentleman, having before his eyes, in the English aristocracy, a perfect model to form his manners, and to teach him how to spend his fortune with dignity and grace. The modern Frenchman is a confused mixture of the Englishman of the evening and the Englishman of the morning; in the morning a little of the former, in the evening a little of the latter. The old French model was the former, or rather, to do each one justice, was the original after which the English aristocracy has formed itself. The American of the North and the Northwest, whose character now gives the tone in the United States, is permanently a man of business, he is always the Englishman of the morning. You find many of the Englishmen of the evening on the plantations of the South, and some are beginning to be met with in the great cities of the North.
Tall, slender, and light of figure, the American seems built expressly for labour; he has no equal for despatch of business. Nobody also can conform so easily to new situations and circumstances; he is always ready to adopt new processes and implements, or to change his occupation. He is a mechanic by nature; among us there is not a schoolboy who has not made a vaudeville, a ballad, or a republican or monarchical constitution; in Massachusetts and Connecticut, there is not a labourer who has not invented a machine or a tool. There is not a man of much consideration, who has not his scheme for a railroad, a project for a village or a town, or who has not in petto some grand speculation in the drowned lands of Red River, in the cotton lands of the Yazoo, or in the corn fields of Illinois. Eminently a pioneer, the American who is not more or less Europeanised, the pure Yankee in a word, is not only a working man, but he is a migratory one. He has no root in the soil, he has no feeling of reverence and love for the natal spot and the paternal roof; he is always disposed to emigrate, always ready to start in the first steamer that comes along, from the place where he had but just now landed. He is devoured with a passion for locomotion, he cannot stay in one place; he must go and come, he must stretch his limbs and keep his muscles in play. When his feet are not in motion, his fingers must be in action, he must be whittling a piece of wood, cutting the back of his chair, or notching the edge of the table, or his jaws must be at work grinding tobacco. Whether it be that a continual competition has given him the habit, or that he has an exaggerated estimate of the value of time, or that the unsettled state of everything around him keeps his nervous system in a state of perpetual agitation, or that he has come thus from the hands of nature, he always has something to be done, he is always in a terrible hurry. He is fit for all sorts of work, except those which require slow and minute processes. The idea of these fills him with horror; it is his hell. "We are born in haste," says an American writer, "we finish our education on the run; we marry on the wing; we make a fortune at a stroke, and lose it in the same manner, to make and lose it again ten times over, in the twinkling of an eye. Our body is a locomotive, going at the rate of twentyfive miles an hour; our soul, a high-pressure engine; our life is like a shooting star, and death overtakes us at last like a flash of lightning."[CM]
"Work," says American society to the poor man; "work, and at eighteen years of age, although a mere workman, you shall get more than a captain in Europe. You shall live in plenty, be well-clothed, well-lodged, and be able to lay up a part of your earnings. Be attentive to your work, be sober and religious, and you will find a devoted and submissive partner of your fortunes; you shall have a more comfortable home, than many of the higher classes of the commonalty in Europe. From a journeyman, you will become a master; you will have apprentices and dependents under you in turn; you shall have credit without stint; you shall become a manufacturer or agriculturist on a great scale; you shall speculate and become rich; you shall found a town and give it your own name; you shall be a member of the legislature of the State, or alderman of the city, and finally member of Congress; your son will have as good a chance to be made President as the son of the President himself. Work, and if the fortune of business should be against you, and you fall, you will soon be able to rise again; for a failure is nothing but a wound in battle; it will not deprive you of the esteem or confidence of any one, if you have always been prudent and temperate, a good Christian and a faithful husband."
"Work," it says to the rich, "work, and do not stop to think of enjoying your wealth. You shall increase your income without increasing your expenses; you shall enlarge your fortune, but it will be only to increase the sources of labour for the poor, and to extend your power over the material world. Be simple and severe in your exterior, but at home you may have the richest carpets, plate in abundance, the finest linens of Ireland and Saxony; externally your house shall be on the same model with all the others of the town; you shall have neither livery nor equipage; you shall not patronise the theatre, which tends to relax morals; you shall avoid play; you shall sign the articles and pledges of the Temperance Society; you shall not even indulge in good cheer; you shall set an example of constant attendance at church; you shall always show the most profound respect for morals and religion, for the farmer and mechanic around you have their eyes fixed upon you; they take you for their pattern, they still acknowledge you to be the arbiter of manners and customs, although they have taken from you the political sceptre. If you give yourself up to pleasure, to parade, to amusement, to dissipation and luxury, they also will give the reins to their gross appetites and their violent passions. Your country will be ruined, and you will be ruined with it."
It is possible to imagine various social systems differently organised but equally favourable, theoretically, to the promotion of industry. We may imagine a society organised for labour under the influence of the principle of authority; that is, a society composed of a gradation of ranks; we may conceive another constituted under the auspices of the principle of liberty or independence. To organise a priori, for purposes of industry, any given people, it is necessary, under penalty of engendering a Utopian scheme, to consult the circumstances of its origin and the condition of its territory, to know whence and how it has come, and whither it is going. With the people of the United States, a scion of the English stock, and thoroughly imbued with Protestantism, the principle of independence, of individualism, of competition, in fine, could not but be successful. The iron hearts of the Puritans, the Ultras of Protestantism, could not fail to find this principle congenial to them. It is owing to this course that the sons of New England, which was peopled by the Pilgrims, have played the chief part in the occupation of the great valley of the Mississippi.
The civilisation of the West[CN] has sprung from the secret and silent co-operation of two or three hundred thousand young farmers, who started, each on his own account, from New England, often alone, sometimes with a small company of friends. This system would not have succeeded with Frenchmen. The Yankee alone in the woods, with no companion but his wife, is all-sufficient for himself. The Frenchman is eminently social; he could not bear the solitude in which the Yankee would feel at his ease. The latter, although solitary, becomes excited by his own plans and eager to accomplish them. The Frenchman cannot become interested in any industrial enterprise except in connection with others, whose concurrence with him is evident and palpable, or rather he rarely becomes interested in any material task, for he reserves his affections and sympathies for living objects. It is quite impossible for him to fall in love with a clearing, to feel the same transports at the success of a manufacture as for the safety of a friend or the happiness of a mistress; but he is capable of applying himself to the task with ardour, if his characteristic passions, his thirst for glory and his spirit of emulation, are brought into play by contact with human beings. If it were proposed, then, to settle colonies with Frenchmen, it would be necessary to put little reliance on individual efforts. In all things, as well as in a line of battle, a Frenchman must feel his neighbour's elbow. Americans might be thrown separately upon a new land, they would form little centres round which constantly expanding circles of population and cultivation would grow up. But if the new settlers were Frenchmen, it would be necessary to carry with them a society ready constituted, social bonds already binding them in, or at least a regular social framework, and bolts to which the social bonds are to be attached; that is, they must have, at starting, the great circle with its centre strongly marked.